Multiuser detection with accurate channel estimation for collided AIS packets

In a space-based automatic identification system (AIS), a satellite has a wide coverage area and thus can receive AIS signals from ships in the high seas. However, wide coverage can cause multiple AIS packets to collide with each other at the satellite receiver. Furthermore, transmitted packets are affected by channel parameters, such as Doppler shifts, channel impulse response, and propagation delay time, which are remarkably different in each packet because these parameters depend on the distance and relative speed between ships and the satellite. Therefore, these parameters should be estimated and used for multiuser detection to detect collided packets separately. Nevertheless, when the received power difference between packets or desired to undesired signal power ratio (DUR) is low, the accuracy of the channel parameter estimation is degraded so severely, such that multiuser detection cannot maintain sufficient bit error rate (BER) performance. To compensate for the reduced accuracy, this paper proposes a highly accurate channel estimation method. In addition to the conventional correlation-based channel estimation, the proposed method applies the quasi-Newton and least-squares methods to estimate Doppler frequency and channel impulse response, respectively. Regarding the propagation delay time, the conventional correlation-based channel estimation is repeated for improvement. Multiuser detection based on the Viterbi algorithm is performed using the estimated channel parameters. Computer simulations were conducted under the conditions of two collision packets and Rician fading, and the results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy of the channel estimation and BER performance than the conventional method.