Low-complexity minimum-SER channel equalization for OFDM underwater acoustic communications

Abstract

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is promising for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications as it is robust against large delay spread. However, OFDM suffers from intercarrier interference (ICI) caused by the serious Doppler effect in UWA channels. Attentive to the property that the ICI is mainly contributed by the adjacent subcarriers in UWA channels, in this paper, we propose a novel low-complexity frequency-domain equalizer to combat the ICI for OFDM UWA communications. Specifically, the coefficients of the equalizer are obtained by using the nor- malized gradient algorithm which is based on the minimum symbol error rate (MSER) criterion. The proposed equalizer uses very few (typical 3) FIR taps to mitigate the ICI for each subchannel, yet achieves better SER performance than the conventional equalizer based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion.