Doubly selective underwater acoustic channel estimation with basis expansion model

Channel estimation for underwater acoustic (UWA) channels in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is one of the most difficult problems in UWA communications. Because UWA channels are both frequency-selective and time-selective, the total number of channel coefficients to be estimated will significantly increase. Besides, the fast time-varying characteristics and strong Doppler effects will deteriorate the orthogonality between the OFDM subcarriers and cause inter-carrier interference (ICI). To handle these problems, in this paper, we firstly transform the discrete doubly selective UWA channel model into an expansion of complex exponential basis. Based on the basis expansion model (BEM) of UWA channels, we then equivalently transform the channel estimation problem into the recovery of sparse BEM coefficients. Finally, a modified sparse signal recovery scheme based on block sparse Bayesian learning is proposed to estimate the doubly selective UWA channel state information (CSI). Simulation results confirm its performance merits.