An Improved BICM-ID Receiver for the Time-Varying Underwater Acoustic Communications with DDPSK Modulation

Double differential phase shift keying(DDPSK) modulation is an efficient method to compensate the Doppler shifts, whereas the phase noise will be amplified which results in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss. In this paper, we propose a novel receiver architecture for underwater acoustic DSSS communications with Doppler shifts. The proposed method adopts not only the DDPSK modulation to compensate the Doppler shifts, but also the improved bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID) algorithm for DDPSK to recover the SNR loss. The improved DDPSK demodulator adopts the multi-symbol estimation to track the channel variation, and an extended trellis diagram is constructed for DDPSK demodulator. Theoretical simulation shows that our system can obtain around 10.2 dB gain over the uncoded performance, and 7.4 dB gain over the hard-decision decoding performance. Besides, the experiment conducted in the Songhua Lake also shows that the proposed receiver can achieve lower BER performance when Doppler shifts exists.