Compressed sensing based channel estimation and impulsive noise cancelation in underwater acoustic OFDM systems

Abstract

Impulsive noise occurs frequently in underwater acoustic (UA) channels and can significantly degrade the performance of UA orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In this paper, we propose a novel compressed sensing based algorithm for joint channel estimation and impulsive noise cancelation in UA OFDM systems. The proposed algorithm jointly estimates the channel impulse response and the impulsive noise by utilizing the pilot subcarriers. The estimated impulsive noise is then converted to the time domain and removed from the received signals. The proposed algorithm is applied to process the data collected during the UA communication experiment conducted in December 2015 in the estuary of the Swan River, Western Australia. The results show that the proposed approach improves the performance of both channel estimation and impulsive noise mitigation.