Adaptive Receiver Design for Long-Range Underwater Acoustic Communications

Long-range data transmission through underwater acoustic (UWA) channel is a challenging issue for underwater acoustic communications (UAC). The issue is reflected in the high path loss to the received signal and non-white background noise. To address this issue, adaptive receiver is designed in this paper. The receiving procedure, including channel estimation and diversity combination can be adaptively tuned to match the channel conditions and background noise. Underwater experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive receiver. Compare with conventional methods, adaptive receiver designed in this paper can achieve about 2 dB improvement for long-range data transmission at a distance of 30 km.