Iterative Carrier Frequency Offset and Channel Estimation for Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems

This paper presents a practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded OFDM system designed for the underwater acoustic channel with its attendant sparse multipath channel and Doppler effects. The carrier frequency offset (CFO) and channel state information (CSI) are assumed unavailable to both to the transmitter and the receiver. Several different receiver structures are considered, all of which perform CFO/channel estimation, detection and decoding in an iterative manner. The convergence behavior of the iterative receivers and their asymptotic performance are evaluated using the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart method. OFDM receiver performance is further evaluated through simulations and field tests in shallow water.