Differential Orthogonal Space-Time Block Coding Modulation for Time-Variant Underwater Acoustic Channels

Reliable underwater acoustic (UWA) communications are challenging since the channels are well known to be doubly selective in both time and frequency domains. The doubly-selective fading UWA channels, however, also provide double diversity gains. In addition, multiple transducers and/or hydrophones are often deployed, providing space diversity to combat channel fading. To exploit all these diversities, a differential multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) scheme for doubly-selective fading channels is presented in this paper. The proposed differential orthogonal space-time block coding (DOSTBC) approach adopts the basis expansion model (BEM) to capture the channel variation in time domain. Both analytical and simulated results show that the proposed BEM–DOSTBC approach is reliable by collecting 3-D diversity: space, multipath, and Doppler. The proposed approach was tested during the RACE08 sea experiment and its reliability was confirmed by the experiment results.