Joint Equalization and Phase Drift Compensation for the Underwater Acoustic Channel

In this paper we consider the use of single carrier modulations combined with frequency-domain equalization schemes (SC-FDE) for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications. The propagation channel is doubly selective, with both time dispersion effects inherent to multipath propagation and phase drifts associated to Doppler effects. We propose a joint equalization and phase drift estimation and compensation scheme. Our performance results show that the proposed receiver is able to accurately estimate phase drifts and compensate them, allowing significant performance improvements in the presence of strong phase drifts.