Performance analysis of joint equalizer and phase-locked loop in underwater acoustic communications

In this paper, the performance of joint equalizer and phase-locked loop in underwater communications is analyzed. In the channel where the Doppler frequency exists, it is difficult to recover the transmitted data only by the equalizer. To compensate for the Doppler frequency, the phase-locked loop is used. For removing the time-varying multipath and the Doppler frequency simultaneously, the equalizer and the phase-locked loop operate jointly. Also, if the initial Doppler frequency error obtained by Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is compensated, the convergence speed of the joint equalizer and phase-locked loop can be improved. To verify the performance, lake and sea experiments were conducted. As a result, it was showed that the joint equalizer and phase-locked loop converges sufficiently in the preamble (known data) period regardless of whether the Doppler frequency is compensated or not. And, the bit error in random data period is not occurred. However, we can increase the convergence speed of the equalizer more than twice through the compensation of Doppler frequency.