Impact of Equalizer step size in Underwater Acoustic Communication Channel

Abstract

The Underwater Acoustic Channel (UAC) is a time variant channel and its multipath effects create ISI. This is one of the most important obstacles in the UAC channel which reduces the transmission rate. To remove this obstacle, a proper filter has to be designed in the receiver section. In this article, optimal step size for equalizer is computed and compared the results with the known techniques namely Decision Feedback Equalizer with interleave division multiple access (DFE IDMA) and Cyclic Prefix - Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM) Equalizer. Channels are modeled using ray tracing methods. The various factors considered are ambient noise, attenuation loss, bottom and surface loss. The overall path loss for channels is computed by summing up the attenuation loss, surface and bottom loss. Simulation results evident that for short range UAC channel, the BER in the order of 10-2 is achieved using proposed methodology with least Eb/No compared to standard DFE method.