Exploiting joint sparsity for underwater acoustic MIMO communications

MIMO communication has been recognized as a potential solution for high speed underwater acoustic communication, which unfortunately encounters significant difficulties posed by simultaneous presence of multipath and Co-channel interference (CoI). Sparsity contained in the multipath structure of underwater acoustic channels offers an effective way for improving channel estimation quality and thus enhancing the communication performance in the form of time reversal or channel estimation based equalization. However, for MIMO channels with extensive multipath and CoI, the performance gain achieved by classic sparsity exploitation channel estimation methods such as orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is still not enough to yield satisfactory performance. Under quasi-stationary assumption, underwater acoustic channels of adjacent data blocks exhibit correlated multipath structure, namely, multipath arrivals with similar time delay but different magnitude, which has not been exploited. In this paper, a joint sparse recovery approach is proposed to exploit the sparse correlation among adjacent data blocks to improve the performance of channel estimation. Under the framework of distributed compressed sensing (DCS), a joint sparse model which treats the multipath arrivals as sparse solutions with common time support is adopted to derive a joint sparse recovery algorithm for efficient channel estimation, the results of which are used to initialize and periodly update a channel estimation based time reversal receiver. Finally, underwater MIMO communication experimental results obtained in a shallow water channel are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to the same type of receiver that do not exploit the joint sparse.