Iterative double-differential direct-sequence spread spectrum reception in underwater acoustic channel with time-varying Doppler shifts

Conventional double differential phase-shift keying modulation amplifies the phase noise and performs poorly under the time-varying direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) communication system. Therefore, the authors propose an iterative reception for DSSS communication in time-varying underwater acoustic channels. First, bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding integrated with multi-symbol differential detection is used. Second, this paper uses cross correlation method to estimate and track the Doppler shift of each symbol. Based on Doppler estimates, a dynamic linear prediction model is proposed to estimate and track the channel phase variation. Third, an algorithm for adaptive selection of reference signals is utilized to recover the magnitude attenuation of correlation peaks. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed reception achieves around 9 dB gain compared to conventional differential decision reception under constant acceleration of 0.14 m/s2. During the acoustic communication experiment in Songhua Lake, the proposed reception was tested by using a moving source at a speed of 1–6 knots at 2-m depth and the farthest distance between the transceivers is 2.8 km. The proposed reception achieves only one frame error from a total of 205 frames collected in the lake experiment, and it also achieves error-free communications over 96 frames during a 10 km depth deep-sea experiment.