Experimental evaluation of Turbo receivers in single-input single-output underwater acoustic channels

Abstract

This paper presents some experimental results on both the channel estimation based minimum mean square error Turbo equalizer (CE MMSE-TEQ) and the direct-adaptation turbo equalizer (DA-TEQ) in single-input single-output (SISO) underwater acoustic (UWA) channels. For CE MMSE-TEQ, we compare the soft-decision feedback Turbo equalizer (SDFE), the bidirectional soft-decision feedback Turbo equalizer (Bi-SDFE) and the classic linear Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) Turbo equalizer in terms of bit error rate (BER) performance. For DA-TEQ, the recently proposed soft-decision direct-adaptation TEQ (Soft DA-TEQ) is evaluated with the same set of experimental data. Both QPSK and multilevel modulations (8PSK and 16QAM) have been tested with the symbol rate of 9.77 ksymbols/s. Experimental results show that the CE-TEQs are more robust in SISO underwater acoustic transmission under harsh channel conditions. Especially, with low pilot overheads, the recently proposed Bi-SDFE achieved low BER performance in all cases.