Shallow water acoustic channel estimation using two-dimensional frequency characterization

Shallow water acoustic channel estimation techniques are presented at the intersection of time, frequency, and sparsity. Specifically, a mathematical framework is introduced that translates the problem of channel estimation to non-uniform sparse channel recovery in two-dimensional frequency domain. This representation facilitates disambiguation of slowly varying channel components against high-energy transients, which occupy different frequency ranges and also exhibit significantly different sparsity along their local distribution. This useful feature is exploited to perform non-uniform sampling across different frequency ranges, with compressive sampling across higher Doppler frequencies and close to full-rate sampling at lower Doppler frequencies, to recover both slowly varying and rapidly fluctuating channel components at high precision. Extensive numerical experiments are performed to measure relative performance of the proposed channel estimation technique using non-uniform compressive sampling against traditional compressive sampling techniques as well as sparsity-constrained least squares across a range of observation window lengths, ambient noise levels, and sampling ratios. Numerical experiments are based on channel estimates from the SPACE08 experiment as well as on a recently developed channel simulator tested against several field trials. (C) 2016 Acoustical Society of America.