Joint channel and Doppler shift estimation for underwater acoustic single carrier system

Abstract

Underwater acoustic channel is a time-varying, strong multipath channel. Due to the low velocity of sound (about 1500 m/s), Doppler shift, occurred by the relative motion between transmitter and receiver, restricts the performance of communication. In order to transmit data in underwater acoustic single carrier communication system with strong stability and high reliability, especially in high mobility scenarios, a joint channel and Doppler shift estimation method is proposed in this paper. We propose a novel data frame structure based on a Gold sequence, so the channel and Doppler shift can be estimated. For different underwater scenarios, we design Gold sequence templates with different Doppler factors. When the Gold sequence from the received data frame is extracted, with good correlation characteristics of the Gold sequence, the maximum correlation value can be calculated, and the Doppler shift corresponding to the maximum is the estimation of Doppler shift. Then Doppler shift will be compensated by resampling the communication data. For channel estimation, the Gold sequence is also used to estimate the time-domain channel impulse response (CIR). Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively estimate channel and Doppler shift in an environment with multipath and Doppler.