Outlier Robust Kalman Filter based Channel Tracking for Single-Carrier Underwater Acoustic Communications

For underwater acoustic (UWA) communications, the acquisition of accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential in the system design. State-space model based channel tracking scheme has shown great potential under time-varying underwater environments. Existing solutions employ the standard Kalman Filter (KF), which is optimal only when both the process and measurement noise are Gaussian. In real underwater environments, impulsive noise and interference are common, leading to non-Guassian overall noise with heavy tails. In this paper, we propose to employ an Outlier-Robust Kalman Filter (ORKF) for tracking the UWA channels. Simulation and experimental results both confirm the effectiveness of the proposed channel tracking scheme in dealing with outliers.