Iterative Frequency Domain Equalization Combined with LDPC Decoding for Single-Carrier Underwater Acoustic Communications

This paper investigates the detection schemes for single-carrier underwater acoustic communications over the severe time-dispersive channels. A low-density parity-check (LDPC) code is employed for the improvement of the equalization performance. A detection scheme with Turbo conception is proposed which includes a LDPC decoder in the feedback loop of an iterative block decision feedback equalizer (IB-DFE), combining the iterative frequency domain equalization of IB-DFE with the iterative LDPC decoding. The external messages are fully exchanged between the IB-DFE and the decoder during the processing of the joint iterative equalization and decoding. The numerical results demonstrate that the decision signals with higher reliability from the LDPC decoder accelerate the convergence of the equalizer and enhance the detection performance, yielding up to 6 dB performance gains when compared with the scheme without LDPC code. Compared with the concatenated scheme in which the process of the iterative frequency domain equalization is serial concatenated with that of the iterative LDPC decoding, the combined scheme obtains about 2 dB performance gains.