Doppler shift frequency estimation and compensation in underwater acoustic communication using triangle spread carrier technique

The performance of underwater acoustic communication is greatly affected by multipath propagation and Doppler spread. This paper proposes a new communication technique, the Triangle Spread Carrier (TSC) technique, by modifying the existing Sweep Spread Carrier (SSC) technique that is strong in a multipath propagation environment. The proposed TSC technique is a form in which the up-chirp and down-chirp signals have repeated carriers, and each correlation function characteristic is used to estimate and correct the Doppler shift frequency of the receiving signal. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed TSC technique, we present the results of simulations using underwater channel simulators and sea trial conducted in the East Sea. When demodulating using only the estimated Doppler shift frequency as a result of the sea trial, the uncoded bit error rate was up to 0.194, but when the proposed method was applied, the uncoded bit error rate was reduced to 0.001.