Joint passive-phase conjugation with adaptive multichannel combining for coherent underwater acoustic communications

This paper presents a receiver structure which exploits spatial diversity by adaptive multichannel combining, which improves the performance of passive time reversal communications realized by passive-phase conjugation (PPC). PPC processing achieves pulse compression for the time delayed arrivals at the receiver, and this property is used for coherent communications to reduce the computational load. The presented structure takes advantage of pulse compression and performs adaptive multichannel combining, where the number of taps for adaptive multichannel processing is significantly reduced in order to decrease the computational load. With a previous output mean square error (MSE), the adaptive combining minimizes current output MSE, where spatial diversity is exploited by the adaptive combining. This structure improves performance of the passive time reversal approach, even though the taps for combining span one symbol interval. The performance improvement is demonstrated by a set of real data collected in a recent sea experiment, which was conducted in a range dependent acoustic channel over a range of 4 km.