A robust iterative receiver for single carrier underwater acoustic communications under impulsive noise

•We propose an improved SDFE to cope with the problem of SDFE under impulse noise.•A VKW-MCCC-KF is proposed to achieve robust and accurate CE under impulsive noise.•With the proposed ISDFE and VKW-MCCC-KF, we develop a novel iterative receiver.•The proposed receiver achieves robustness to impulsive noise in experiments.