Estimation of Overspread Underwater Acoustic Channel Based on Low-Rank Matrix Recovery

Abstract

In this paper, the estimation of overspread, i.e., doubly spread underwater acoustic (UWA) channels of strong dispersion is considered. We show that although the UWA channel dispersion causes the degeneration of channel sparsity, it leads to a low-rank structure especially when the channel delay-Doppler-spread function is separable in delay and Doppler domain. Therefore, we introduce the low-rank criterion to estimate the UWA channels, which can help to improve the estimation performance in the case of strong dispersion. The estimator is based on the discrete delay-Doppler-spread function representation of channel, and is formulated as a low-rank matrix recovery problem which can be solved by the singular value projection technique. Simulation examples are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed low-rank-based channel estimator.

HW/SW Platform for Measurement and Evaluation of Ultrasonic Underwater Communications

“…UAC channels impose relevant restrictions like strong attenuation, mainly due to water absorption; severe time-dispersion, because of multipath propagation; and also, frequency-dispersion, due to the Doppler broadening caused by the medium and terminals motion [1][2][3]. All these factors impede the use of high data-rate communication systems [4,5], because the high delay spread and the low speed of sound put UAC channels around the limit, even crossing it, of being overspread [6][7][8][9]. Hence, the applications are mostly oriented to low-rate communications, like a collection of data from sensor networks, environmental monitoring, surveillance, etc.…”