Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117

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Applied Acoustics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apacoust

Performance analysis of an improved modal dispersion compensation

receiver for low-frequency and long-range shallow water
communication experiment
Dianlun Zhang a,b,c, Shuang Xiao a,b,c, Hongyu Cui a,b,c,⇑, Dazhi Gao d, Lu Liu a,b,c, Dajun Sun a,b,c
a
College of Underwater Acoustic Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
b
Acoustic Science and Technology Laboratory, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China
c
Key Laboratory of Marine Information Acquisition and Security (Harbin Engineering University), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Harbin 150001, China
d
College of Information Science and Technology, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Low-frequency acoustic signal will suffer from dispersion effect when propagating in long-range shallow
Received 24 August 2019 water waveguide, which leads to multi-mode and waveform expanding. Longer transmission range and
Received in revised form 21 October 2019 shallower waveguide will result in more serious dispersion effect. In this paper, we propose an improved
Accepted 24 October 2019
modal dispersion compensation receiver, and evaluate its performance for a shallow water acoustic com-
Available online 5 November 2019
munication experiment. The receiver not only exploits time-frequency analysis approach to compensate
the waveform expanding effect of each mode simultaneously, but also combines the modified multi-
2019 MSC:
mode energy to enhance symbol estimation accuracy. The experiment is conducted by a differential-bin
00-01
99-00
ary-phase-shift-keying modulated direct-sequence-spread-spectrum communication system, which is
suitable for long-range transmission. With this receiver, we obtain no error demodulation results without
coding in the experiment. The experimental data analysis also shows that the proposed receiver can
obtain about 3 dB gain than the conventional one, which is of significant importance for long-range
communications.
Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction combination of a few multi-mode components with distinct non-

Long-range underwater communication in shallow water is one
of the key points of the underwater acoustic communication tech-
nology [1]. During the last two decades, many works have been
conducted in this area [2–8]. To deal with the low signal-to-noise
ratio (SNR) and severe channel fading, various advanced demodu-
lation techniques combined with temporal/spatial diversity were
proposed to achieve reliable communication. Another proper way
for dealing with this issue is to utilize low-frequency signal since
the signal transmission loss increases rapidly with frequency due
to water absorption and boundary interaction. At such circum-
stance, the acoustic field in low-frequency and long-range (LFLR)
waveguide is more accurate to be represented by normal mode
theory [9]. According to this theory, the received signal is the
⇑ Corresponding author at: College of Underwater Acoustic Engineering, Harbin
Engineering University, Harbin 150001, China.
E-mail address: cuihongyu@hrbeu.edu.cn (H. Cui).
linear phases. Compared with the transmitted waveform in the
time domain, the received signal is the combination of several
waveform replicas with distinct expanding levels. The phe-
nomenon of the multiple waveform replicas is known as inter-
mode dispersion, and the phenomenon of the waveform expanding
is known as intra-mode dispersion [10]. For conventional medium
and high frequency acoustic signal, only the inter-mode dispersion
is obvious, which is known by the multipath effect. Since the LFLR
received signal suffers more serious distortion, many superior
receivers which are suitable for medium and high frequency
underwater acoustic communications can no longer achieve the
optimal performance directly.
To obtain a superior receiver for the LFLR shallow water com-
munications, the two modal dispersion phenomenon has to be
taken into account. Several modified receiver structures have been
proposed during the past two decades. J.C. Preisig et al. try to com-
bine the mode filtering with channel equalization to demodulate
each mode separately [11]. Their work is enhanced in [12,13] to

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2019.107117
0003-682X/Ó 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117
select the less dispersive mode for shallow water and deep water
communications. However, these methods can only operate with
array signal, and cannot exploit the received power of the disper-
sive modes, which may lead to SNR loss. Another research shown
in [14] uses estimated mode function separator to separate all
modes, and then eliminates dispersion of specific mode in warping
domain [15] to improve the matching filter gain. This method not
only needs the specific transmitted waveform, but also adopts a
series of complex steps to separate the effective modes, and the
algorithm is only verified by the simulation results.
In [16], we proposed a modal dispersion compensation (MDC)
receiver, which exploited dedispersion transform [17] to compen-
sate the intra-mode dispersion first, and then used the rake recei-
ver to combine the inter-mode dispersion. Through the MDC
receiver, the dispersive signal power in the time-frequency domain
was gathered which results in the SNR improvement. Comparing
with other kind of approaches, this receiver tried to recover the
waveform expanding effect of the received pulse by a single recei-
ver, and exploited all available power to demodulate symbols. The
efficiency of the receiver was verified by the simulation under the
ideal waveguide environment in [16]. However, the proposed algo-
rithm suffers from performance limitation when we test its validity
by the experimental data. Due to the inhomogeneous characteris-
tics of the real ocean waveguide, the optimal recovery parameters
for each mode are different, which will bring difficulties in elimi-
nating all intra-mode dispersion simultaneously. Aiming at this
issue, we propose an improved MDC (IMDC) receiver structure
for real data in this paper. The improved receiver formulate the
time-equal line to recover the intra-dispersive modes continu-
ously, and thus the multiple optimal parameters issue is overcome
and dedispersive operation can be realized by one step. The relia-
bility of the improved receiver is verified by a LFLR shallow water
communication experiment.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Next section
we present the communication system design of our experiment.
Experimental setup and data analysis are shown in Section 3. Sec-
tion 4 concludes the paper.
2. Communication system structure
During our LFLR shallow water communication experiment, we
adopt direct-sequence-spread-spectrum (DSSS) sequence and the
differential-binary-phase-shift-keying (DBPSK) modulation [18].
The DSSS system can achieve superior performance in long-range
channel for its high processing gain and low system complexity,
and the DBPSK modulation can resist phase variation as well as
avoid the channel estimation [19].
2.1. Transmitter design
In our DSSS communication experiment, the baseband signal
can be written as [20]
NX
u 1 X
N c 1
xð t Þ ¼ uk ci g ðt  iT c Þ;
k¼1 i¼0
where Nu and N c represent the length of transmitted symbols uk and
spread-spectrum sequence ci , respectively. g ðtÞ stands for the chip
pulse shaping function and T c is the chip interval. The transmitted
symbols uk is related to the information symbol dk by [21]
uk ¼ uk1 dk
in which the information is carried by the relative phase between
continuous transmitted symbols in the DPSK modulation. In our
experiment, we choose the pseudo-noise (PN) codes as spreading
codes ci to improve bandwidth efficiency and avoid sidelobe
interference. g ðt Þ is root-raised cosine function to reduce inter-
symbol interference. After differential coding, the signal is modu-
lated to the passband, which can be written as
 
sðt Þ ¼ Re xðt Þejx0 t ; ð3Þ
where x0 is the carrier angular frequency.
2.2. Channel characteristics
According to the normal mode theory, the range-independent
shallow-water acoustic pressure field at range r (relative to the
source) and depth z can be represented in the frequency domain
as [1]
XM
eikrm ðxÞr
Hðx; r; zÞ ¼ Q wm ðx; zs Þwm ðx; zÞ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ; ð4Þ
m¼1 krm ðxÞr
ip=4
where Q is defined by pffiffiffiffi
ie
8pqðz Þ
representing a constant factor, and
s
qðzs Þ is the water density at source depth. M is the number of effec-
tive propagating modes. wm and krm are the modal depth function
and horizontal wavenumber of mode m, respectively. In the time
domain, the channel model can be expressed as [22]
X
M
hðt Þ ¼ am ðt ÞejUm ðtÞ ð5Þ
m¼1
by the method of stationary phase with inverse Fourier transform.
The am ðt Þ and Um ðt Þ are the complex amplitude and time evolving
phase of mode m, respectively. As can be seen, the received signal
at ðr; zÞ is the combination of M modal components, and each mode
has a specific nonlinear phase. For a given mode, the phase and
group velocity are defined by the phase function as follows
 1  1
krm ðxÞ dkrm ðxÞ
v pm ¼ and v gm ¼ : ð6Þ
x dx
The phase and group velocity represent the horizontal velocity
of a particular phase and the energy transport, respectively. For a
slightly downward refracting sound speed profile waveguide
depicted in Fig. 1, we can have the velocity curves conducted by
Kraken software [23]. The lower 3 order modes are shown in Fig. 2.
We can see clearly that both phase velocity and group velocity
are nonlinear functions of mode order m and frequency x. For the
phase velocity at upper half part, lower frequency and higher
modal order lead to a higher value, whereas for the group velocity
at lower half part, higher frequency and lower modal order refer to
faster velocity. Therefore, the received signal is seriously distorted.
Meanwhile, the transmission delay caused by group velocity varies
along with modal orders and frequency components. This will lead
to multi-mode components and broadband waveform expanding,
which is regarded as the effect of inter-mode and intra-mode
dispersion.
ð1Þ
ð2Þ
Fig. 1. The simulated waveguide.
 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117
Fig. 2. The velocity curves of the first 3 modes.
An example of transmitting a 250–350 Hz Continuous Wave
(CW) signal in the non-noise channel depicted in Fig. 1 is shown
in Fig. 3. Fig. 3(a) reveals that the received signal has multi-mode
components. The waveform of high order modes is expanded,
and it is easily covered up by noise. Moreover, the similarity
between the received modes and the transmitted signal decreases
as mode order increases, and thus the gain after matching filter
also decreases. According to the time-frequency analysis by Short
Time Fourier Transform (STFT) in Fig. 3(b), we can see that the
received signal undergoes both inter-mode and intra-mode disper-
sion in the time-frequency domain, because higher frequency and
lower order components propagate faster.
2.3. Receiver design
After propagating through the dispersive channel, the received
signal in time domain can be expressed by a general form as
X
M
r ðt Þ ¼ am ðt Þsm ðt  sm Þ þ tðtÞ;
m¼0
where sm ðt Þ is the inter-mode dispersive waveform corresponding
to the transmitted waveform sðt Þ and sm is the time delay of mode
m corresponding to the phase of Eq. (5). tðt Þ is the noise component.
Note that the only difference between above received signal and
conventional medium and high frequency communication signal
is the distorted term sm ðtÞ, because the intra-mode dispersion effect
is different for different modes [16,24].
The receiver structure for our experiment mainly contains three
steps: despreading, dedispersion and decoding. Note that since the
dispersion effect is caused by carrier frequency, the first two steps
are done in the passband. For each received symbol rk ðt Þ, the
despreading operation can be accomplished by matching filter to
correlate the received signal with local spread sequence replica
Fig. 3. The first 3 received modes under waveguide in Fig. 1. (a) The waveform in time domain; (b) The time-frequency analysis by STFT.
3
PNc 1
zðtÞ ¼ i¼0 ci g ðt  iT c Þejx0 t . Using this technique, signal energy
can be concentrated because of spreading gain. In contrast with
conventional medium and high frequency underwater acoustic
communications, the waveform of each received mode suffers dis-
tinct intra-mode dispersion in LFLR shallow water channel, and
thus the correlation gain between sm ðt Þ and zðtÞ suffers perfor-
mance loss, especially for high dispersive modes. As a result, the
correlation peak corresponding to these modes will show low tol-
erance to the noise level, which will decrease demodulation
accuracy.
The dedispersion transform is used to recover sðt Þ from sm ðt Þ.
Assuming RðxÞ is the Fourier transform of a single symbol after
despreading, the transform tries to pre-process the intra-mode dis-
persion by a modified inverse Fourier transform which is defined
as [26]
Z 1  0 0 1=b 
1 xr n x
pðn0 ; r 0 Þ ¼ dxRðxÞe i c ; ð8Þ
2p 1
where b is waveguide-invariant. The transform can be regarded as a
kind of double-parameters transform in fn0 ; r 0 g plane. The pðn0 ; r 0 Þ of
each mode is represented by a bright line and the maximum value
 
of each line reveals the optimal value n0m ; r 0m of mode m. At that
point, the nonlinear phase influence of the particular mode in Eq.
(8) is removed and the intra-mode dispersive is compensated. The
velocities difference between different frequencies component in
a certain mode are corrected and each received mode turn to the
replica of the transmitted pulse. The relative timescale is recovered
by [16]
r 0 n0 x0
1=b1
t¼ þ : ð9Þ
c bc
From the simulation in [16] we find that the optimal r 0m for different
ð7Þ modes are the same in ideal waveguide with isovelocity profile, and
thus we can obtain the time domain waveform by extracting
r0m ¼ ropt axis and obtain the relative timescale by Eq. (9). At that
time, each expanding mode can be recovered simultaneously. How-
ever, for the environment with non-ideal physical characteristics,
the optimal ropt for each mode is different as depicted in Fig. 4,
and thus the time domain recovery method should be improved.
To solve this problem, we define the time-equal line to recover
the dedispersive waveform of each mode simultaneously [25]. In
Eq. (9), we can find that r0 varies linearly with n0 when there exists
a fixed t o . In other words, for a certain t o , we can obtain a n0  r 0 line
1=b1
n0 x 0
in the searching plane fn0 ; r0 g, which defined by r 0 ¼  b
þ ct o .
All the points in this line experience the same timescale. With the
above simple preparations, we now take Fig. 4 as an example to
illustrate the steps of signal recovery to time domain.
4 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117
Fig. 4. The dedispersion plane fn0 ; r0 g of received signal in Fig. 3.
Step 1 Obtaining the optimal value: The optimal value of each
mode is the brightest point in each line. Searching the power max-
imum point of each bright line, then we can get the optimal value
n0m ; r 0m ; 1 6 m 6 Mfor each mode. In Fig. 4, O1 n01 ; r01 ; O2
n02 ; r02 ; O3 n03 ; r 03 are the optimal points of the 3 modes,
respectively.
Step 2 Determine the required time-equal lines: After getting
the position of the optimal point of each mode, we can get the
power maximum timescale t 1 ; t 2 ; . . . ; tm of each mode by Eq. (9).
Selecting a suitable timescale between power maximum timescale
of the adjacent modes, we can obtain the proper time-equal line. In
Fig. 4, there exist 3 modes and we require 2 lines, which are
defined by AB and CD.
Step 3 Obtaining the recovery part of each mode: Finding the
intersections of r0 ¼ r0m with its adjacent time-equal lines and
define them as n0m;l ; r0m and n0m;r ; r0m , respectively. The n01;l is
defined as the lower boundary of the n0 axis, whereas the n0M;r is
the upper boundary. The points between n0m;l ; r0m and n0m;r ; r 0m
will combine the recovery part of mode m. In Fig. 4,
I1;l  I1;r ; I2;l  I2;r and I2;l  I2;r are the recovery part of the 3 modes,
respectively.
Step 4 Recover the time domain signal: Since the points at time-
equal line suffer the same timescale, the intersections of r 0 ¼ r0m
and r 0 ¼ r 0mþ1 with the same time-equal line, which produce
n0m;r ; r0m and n0mþ1;l ; r 0mþ1 , experience the same timescale. Con-
necting the recovery part of each mode by
h i
~ 0 0 0 0 0 0 b/s. The probe symbol is a 1023-digit m-sequence, and the trans-
pðtÞ ¼ p n1;l : n1;r ; r 1 ;    ; p nM;l : nM;r ; r M , we can obtain the
continuous recovery modes simultaneously. In Fig. 4, since I1;r
and I1;l ; I2;r and I3;l are on the same line, the connection will suffer
no time gap and the signal formed by the points in polyline
I1;r  I1;l  I2;r  I2;l  I3;r  I3;l is continuous in time domain.
Fig. 5. The dedispersive results for the received CW signal in Fig. 3. (a) The waveform in time domain. (b) The spectrogram analysis by STFT.
The dedispersive results of Fig. 3 is shown in Fig. 5. We can see
that after dedispersion transform, the powers of the 3 modes are
concentrated and all the waveforms are almost the same as the
transmitted signal. Accordingly, for the dispersive correlation peak
after despreading, the matching gain of all modes can also be
enhanced.
The decoding for DPSK is done by calculating phase difference
of peak values between adjacent symbols according to Eq. (2). To
improve decoding accuracy for low SNR, the multi-peak energy is
usually combined to obtain a high input SNR. The most generally
used approach is the maximal ratio combining (MRC) [18]. Assum-
ing am ðkÞ and am ðk þ 1Þ are the recovered correlation peak ampli-
tudes of adjacent symbols, the decoding result is
!
X
M
~ ¼ phase
d 
am ðkÞam ðk þ 1Þ ; ð10Þ
k
m¼1
where  is the conjugate operation.
During the communication experiment, the transmitted packet
usually contains a probe signal to determine synchronization point
and estimate channel characteristics. In our receiver scheme, to
decrease receiver computational complexity, we just calculate
 
optimal parameters n0m ; r 0m and the recovery region p ~ðtÞ by the
probe signal, and substitute the results to the dedispersion trans-
form of each symbol to obtain dedispersive results. The whole
receiver scheme for our LFLR shallow water communication sys-
tem is summarized in Fig. 6.
3. Experiment demonstration and results
The LFLR shallow water communication experiment was con-
ducted on October 13; 2018, in the Yellow Sea in China. The water
depth at the receive region is 46 m, and data were collected by a
hydrophone located 33 m below the water surface. The top of
hydrophone was tied to an anchored platform while the bottom
was equipped with a weight to prevent swinging. A transducer
with bandwidth from 160 Hz to 420 Hz was carried by an anchored
ship located at 20:71 km away from the hydrophone. At this point,
the water depth is 76 m, and the transducer was suspended at a
depth of 3 m. The depth of experiment region varies slowly. The
sea state was relatively calm most of time during the trail.
A transmit packet consists of a probe signal and 60 communica-
tion symbols. The carrier frequency is 300 Hz and the chip rate 100
mitted symbols are 31-digit m-sequence modulated by DBPSK.
The roll-off factor of the square root-raised cosine filter is 0:5,
and thus the effective bandwidth is 150 Hz. The sample frequency
is 3000 Hz and the total length of a packet is 30:95 s with 2 s guard
interval.
 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117 5

Fig. 6. Structure of the dedispersion based receiver.

3.1. Channel characteristics

The received SNR is about 5:21 dB. First, we show the channel
characteristics and the performance of the dedispersion transform.
After correlation with local replica, the received 1023-digit m-
sequence is shown in Fig. 7. From the figure we can see that the
received signal has 2 effective modes around 0:22 s and 0:4 s,
and both suffer visible inter-mode dispersion effect. The power of
mode 2 is more dispersive so that it can hardly be distinguished
from noise. The relatively low matching gain will reduce the ability
to resist noise. Besides, the expanding waveform cause difficulties
in finding the peak value of each mode, which will bring extra error
when calculating the phase of the adjacent symbols.
The dedispersive operation is done by searching the power
Fig. 8. The dedispersion plane fn0 ; r0 g for dispersive 1023-digit m-sequence.
maximum point of Eq. (8) in the fn0 ; r0 g plane. The searching plane
in the suitable region is shown in Fig. 8. We can see 2 bright lines
corresponding to the 2 modes in the figure. The optimal value of
each mode is the brightest point in each line. Note that for the symbols. From last subsection we find that the number of effective
experimental data, the optimal parameters are different for each modes is 2. Without dedispersion step, the symbol constellation
   
mode. After getting the optimal point n01 ; r 01 and n02 ; r02 for the and the phase error [21] of the 2 modes are plotted in Fig. 10.
two effective modes, we can select an appropriate time-equal line Fig. 10(a) shows the symbol constellations plot of the 1-st
between the two bright lines, which is plotted by the dotted line in mode. The true symbols are located at þ1 and 1. Although the
Fig. 8. Finding the intersections M and N of this line with r01 and r02 , received symbols are scattered near the true symbol, there also
we can recover the continuous time domain signal by axis occurs phase wandering caused by propagation medium. The out-
A  M  N  B in Fig. 8. The dedispersive results are shown in put SNR of Fig. 10(a) is 11:89 dB [27]. Fig. 10(b) shows the phase
Fig. 9(a). We find that the expanding waveform is compensated error which is defined by the difference between the received sym-
and the power dispersion is concentrated. As a result, the relative bols and the transmitted symbols. Symbols which have an absolute
SNR is improved, and the peak of the two effective modes are easy phase error beyond 90 are in error. For the 1-st mode without
to be detected. From the spectrogram in Fig. 9(b), we can also find dedispersion transform, the phase errors are around ½25; þ25
that the inter-mode dispersion is compensated. and no symbol error occurs. Since we just transmit DBPSK signal
during the experiment, from this result we can infer that such
channel can allow DQPSK no-error communication with the 1-st
3.2. Communication results analysis mode signal, because the absolute phase errors are all less than
90 . For the 2-nd mode, the results are presented in Fig. 10(b)
The validity of the dedispersion transform has been proved above. and Fig. 10(d). The output SNR is 2:88 dB. From last subsection
Now we will compare the communication results before and after we know that the peak power is small and easily influenced by
dedispersion operation by the 60 continuous communication the noise. The phase errors of the 2-nd mode are really significant

Fig. 7. The matching filter results of the received 1023-digit m-sequence. (a) The waveform in time domain. (b) The spectrogram analysis by STFT.
6 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117

Fig. 9. The results of 1023-digit m-sequence after dedispersion transform. (a) The waveform in time domain. (b) The spectrogram analysis by STFT.

Fig. 10. The decoding results of the consecutive communication symbols without dedispersion transform. (a) The symbol constellation plot of the 1-st mode. (b) The phase
error of the 1-st mode. (c) The symbol constellation plot of the 2-st mode. (d) The phase error of the 2-st mode.

and 4 symbols are beyond 90 , which result in error
demodulation.
With the receiver structure in Fig. 6, the demodulation results
are shown in Fig. 11. During the dedispersion process here, we
exploit the optimal parameters and the time-equal line calculated
by the probe signal to decrease the complexity of demodulating
system. The output SNR of the 2 modes are 13:07 dB and
13:78 dB, respectively. The phase errors in Fig. 11 and Fig. 11(d)
decrease to ½15; þ30 and ½40; þ40 respectively, and all symbols
are correctly determined for both of the 2 modes. Besides, we can
infer that both of the modes can hold DQPSK no-error communica-
tion with the help of dedispersion transform.
3.3. Experimental data analysis with Gaussian noise
In this subsection, we evaluate the BER variation versus SNR for
experimental data with simulated white Gaussian noise added to
create different SNR values. The Monte-Carlo times is 200, and thus
12000 symbols in all are tested. The resulting BER curves are
shown in Fig. 12.
From Fig. 12 we can see that the BER result is below 104 when
the input SNR is more than 0 dB. For the conventional receiver
without dedispersion transform, the performance gain by only uti-
lizing the 1-st mode is more than 1 dB than that utilizing both of
the 2 modes at high SNR. This is because the power disperse caused
by the intra-mode dispersion effect is so serious that too much
interference are combined from 2-nd mode. However, for the pro-
posed receiver, since the power of the 2-nd mode is centralized and
the SNR is enhanced, the modes combination can obtain about 1 dB
extra gain compared with that only utilized the 1-st mode. The
total gain of the proposed receiver utilized both of the 2 modes
is more than 3 dB higher than the conventional receiver utilized
only the 1-st mode. These results verify the superior capability of
the proposed receiver structure under the LFLR shallow water
 D. Zhang et al. / Applied Acoustics 159 (2020) 107117
Fig. 11. The decoding results of the consecutive communication symbols after dedispersion transform. (a) The symbol constellation plot of the 1-st mode. (b) The phase error
of the 1-st mode. (c) The symbol constellation plot of the 2-st mode. (d) The phase error of the 2-st mode.
Fig. 12. The comparisons between the conventional and the proposed receivers
when utilizing different number of modes.
communication channel. The extra gain is useful for saving trans-
mitting power, increasing transmission range and improving
detection reliability, which is of great significance for underwater
acoustic applications.
4. Conclusions
In this paper, we proposed an IMDC receiver for DSSS-DBSPK
communication system in the LFLR shallow water, and analyzed
its performance by experimental data. The proposed receiver can
centralize the signal power by compensating the waveform expan-
sion effect of each mode simultaneously. As a result, the correla-
tion gain after matching filter can be improved, which can be
further exploited by the multi-mode combination to increase
demodulation accuracy. Experimental results showed that the pro-
posed receiver can improve the output SNR and reduce the decod-
ing phase error. The experimental data analysis with Gaussian
noise also revealed that the proposed receiver can achieve more
7
than 3 dB gain over the conventional receiver, which can verify
its validity and superior capability in LFLR shallow water commu-
nication system.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (Grant Nos. 61601134, 61701132 and 11874331),
National Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang (Grant No.
YQ2019D003), Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science
and Technology Foundation (Grant No. QNLM2016ORP0106).
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