Probabilistic constellation shaping-aided underwater acoustic communication with vector approximate message passing iterative equalization

A probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS)-aided single-carrier transceiver is proposed to improve spectral efficiency for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. At the transmitter, the information bits are input into a distribution matcher followed by a systematic binary encoder, which yields a sequence of sign bits with a uniform distribution and a sequence of amplitude bits with a non-uniform distribution. Based on these two sequences, the PCS is then realized by mapping coded bits onto a quadrature amplitude modulation constellation. At the receiver, an improved frequency-domain turbo equalizer based on the vector approximate message passing (VAMP) is proposed for the PCS-UWA communication system to eliminate the multipath interference. It exploits the a priori symbol probability information benefiting from the PCS at the beginning of the turbo iteration and over the self-iteration of the VAMP soft equalizer, improving the symbol detection performance. Finally, the first experimental demonstration of a deep-sea PCS-UWA communication system and numerical simulation of shallower water are presented. The experimental results reveal the PCS-UWA communication system significantly outperforms traditional systems with no PCS. Also, the proposed receiver is superior to the classical adaptive turbo equalizer based on the improved proportionate normalized least mean square algorithm even with data reuse.

Automated summary

This study proposes a probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS)-aided single-carrier transceiver to enhance the spectral efficiency of underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. The PCS is realized by mapping coded bits onto a quadrature amplitude modulation constellation. An improved frequency-domain turbo equalizer based on the vector approximate message passing (VAMP) is used to eliminate multipath interference. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the PCS-UWA communication system compared to traditional systems and the proposed receiver outperforms the classical adaptive turbo equalizer.