Modeling and channel estimation for piezo-acoustic backscatter assisted underwater acoustic communications

Relying on direct and converse piezoelectric effects, piezo-acoustic backscatter (PAB) technology reflects ambient acoustic signals to enable underwater backscatter communications at near-zero power, which was first realized through a prototype. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model of the PAB assisted underwater acoustic (UWA) communication, and address the sparse channel estimation problem. First, we present a five-stage backscatter process to derive the backscatter coefficient, and propose the channel model for the shallow-water communications. Then, we formulate the shallow-water acoustic channel estimation problem as a sparse vector recovery one according to the compressed sensing theory, and leverage the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) algorithm to obtain the channel estimator. Finally, simulation results are provided to corroborate our proposed studies.