Approximation and adjustment of an underwater time-varying communication channel by using adaptive Beamforming and Basis Expansion Model

Underwater acoustic communication channels have particular characteristics such as: high attenuation, the time-varying nature of propagation environment and low speed of the sound, which make it difficult to send information through these channels. Due to the variability of the environment, communication channels in this media are doubly-selective in both time and frequency domain. The time-varying channel can be expressed using expansion basic functions in order to following the temporal variation of the channel. In this paper, orthogonal Laguerre functions expansion is used to express an underwater MIMO-OFDM acoustic communication channel in which the MIMO-OFDM system uses adaptive beamforming at receiver. In order to have matching between the channel and receiver in the proposed system, digital Laguerre filters is used instead of conventional TDL filters in the beamformer. The results show that the proposed system has low computational complexity. Also it has a considerable improvement in the performance of the underwater acoustic communication system.