Further results on maximal ratio combining under correlated noise for multi-carrier underwater acoustic communication using vector sensors

Abstract

In the isotropic marine ambient noise field, the pressure and particle velocity signal processing based on the maximal ratio combining (MRC) algorithm can effectively improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the underwater acoustic (UWA) communication using acoustic vector sensors (VS). However, the assumption of isotropic ambient noise is not always valid, especially when combined with VS manufacturing errors, which increase the correlation between pressure and velocity branches for the noise and reduce MRC performance. Therefore, a correlation coefficient weighted MRC (CCW-MRC) method is proposed to achieve the optimal combination under correlated noise. And we derive the optimal weighting factors and apply the CCW-MRC method to the multi-carrier M-ary Frequency Shift Keying (MFSK) based UWA communication system with the single acoustic VS. Simulation and the field trial results demonstrate that the proposed CCW-MRC method can improve the received SNR by 2-3 dB compared with the traditional MRC in the multicarrier MFSK based UWA communication system using the single acoustic VS.