Adaptive detection for shallow-water acoustic telemetry with cochannel interference

Adaptive decision feedback equalization (DFE) has recently been used to enable high-rate data transmission through shallow-water acoustic channels. This adaptive receiver successfully tracks and suppresses intersymbol interference due to a dispersive multipath channel. However, acoustic modems which are used for network applications must also contend with interference due to cochannel signals from proximal modems. In this work, we propose and evaluate a multiuser receiver with cochannel interference suppression. The advantages of this multiuser receiver in the presence of strong cochannel interference are shown by a performance comparison to a bank of the single-user DFEs described above. Conclusions are supported in part by the demodulation of experimental data for two simultaneous cochannel signals and by a steady-state performance analysis.