On detecting broadband signals in frequency and time-dispersive channels

The major problem for active sonar operating in shallow water is reverberation. High time-bandwidth waveforms and coherent matched filtering are often used to improve the detection performance. However, in the case of channel distortion, this approach is severely limited and more robust detectors are needed. We evaluate the performance of several detectors for various channel models. We examine the robustness of the detectors by evaluating the performance in the case of mismatch between the detector and the channel parameters. Studying the relation between the fast fading distortion model and the time spreading distortion we show that, under certain conditions, these distortions have a similar effect on the waveform.