Time-Varying Channel Equalization in Underwater Acoustic OFDM Communication System

Abstract: In this paper, three time-varying channel equalization schemes are studied in the underwater acoustic (UWA) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) communication system. The equalization algorithms are the zero-forcing (ZF) equalization algorithm, and the minimum mean square error equalization (MMSE) algorithm and the serial interference cancellation (SIC) equalization algorithm. Among the schemes, there is a problem of needing a large amount of operation when obtaining the inversion of the channel matrix. Then, to reduce the computation complexity of channel matrix inversion, the band approximation of the channel matrix, the serial equalization and the LDLH decomposition are also studied. To evaluate the efficacy of the algorithms studied in this paper, numerical simulation and the field experiment are both conducted. The simulation results proof that each equalization algorithm can work appropriately under different time-varying conditions, and valid the reliability of each simplified algorithm under the same Doppler factor. The results of two sets of field experiment also prove that the simplified algorithm eliminates the influence of the residual narrow band Doppler to a certain extent, and a better effect is obtained while a channel estimation algorithm with higher accuracy is combined. © 2020, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.