Data Selective Rake Reception for Underwater Acoustic Communication in Strong Multipath Interference

Abstract

In underwater acoustic communication (UAC), very long delay waves are caused by reflection from water surfaces and bottoms and obstacles. Their waves interfere with desired waves and induce strong multipath interference. Use of a guard interval (GI) is effective for channel compensation in OFDM. However, a GI tends to be long in shallow-water environment because a guard time is determined by a delay time of multipath. A long GI produces a very long OFDM frame in several seconds, which is disadvantageous to a response speed of communication. This paper presents a method of keeping good communication performance even for a short GI. We discuss influence of intercarrier interference (ICI) in OFDM demodulation and propose a method of data selective rake reception (DSRake). The effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed by received signal distribution and confirmed by simulation results.