Compensation of linear multiscale doppler for OFDM-based underwater acoustic communication systems

In particular cases, such as acceleration, it is required to design a receiver structure that is capable of accomplishing time varying Doppler compensation. In this paper, two approaches are taken into consideration in order to estimate the symbol timing offset parameter. The first method employed to achieve an estimate of this particular parameter is based upon centroid localization and this prediction is reinforced by a second technique which utilises linear prediction, based on the assumption that the speed changes linearly during the OFDM symbol time. Subsequently, the two estimations of the symbol timing offset parameter are smoothed in order to obtain a fine tuned approximation of the Doppler scale. Additionally, the effects of weighting coefficients on smoothing the Doppler scale and on the performance of the receiver are also investigated. The proposed receiver is investigated, incorporating an improvement that includes fine tuning of the coarse timing synchronization in order to accommodate the time-varying Doppler. Based on this fine-tuned timing synchronization, an extension to the improved receiver is presented to assess the performance of two point correlations. The proposed algorithms' performances were investigated using real data obtained from an experiment that took place in the North Sea in 2009.