Joint time-frequency domain equalization of MSK signal over underwater acoustic channel

Minimum shift keying (MSK) shows better bandwidth efficiency than the phase shift keying owing to its high bandwidth usage efficiency and constant envelope property. The performance of frequency-domain block linear equalization (FD-BLE), which is commonly used for MSK communication, is limited in complex time-varying underwater acoustic (UWA) channel. In this paper, a time-domain adaptive decision feedback equalization (TD-ADFE) is proposed to address issues pertaining to MSK communications over UWA channel. Further joint time-frequency domain equalization (JTFDE) built on TD-ADFE and BLE is proposed to further reduce the bit error rate (BER). The proposed method can effectively track the time-varying UWA channel through the updated equalizer coefficient according to the output of de mapper. Numerical simulation shows that the JTFDE performed better than TD-ADFE and FD-BLE over time-varying UWA channel by approximately 2 dB when the BER was 1 x 10(-3).The sea trial results verified the proposed JTFDE and demonstrated that the BER of JTFDE was 82.5% and 88.9% lower than that of TD-ADFE and FD-BLE, respectively.(c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a time-domain adaptive decision feedback equalization method for underwater acoustic communication, and further proposes a joint time-frequency domain equalization method to reduce the bit error rate. Numerical simulation and sea trial results confirm the effectiveness of these two methods.