Two-way relay underwater acoustic communication channels with distributed space-time block coding

In this paper we study the performance of two-way relaying (TWR) over underwater acoustic (UWA) channels in conjunction with distributed space-time block coding (D-STBC). In particular, we consider the communication between two sources via relay nodes. The underlying channels are characterized as doubly selective channels. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is used to combat frequency selectivity of the channels, while front-end multiple resampling (MR) combined with frequency-domain equalization is used to combat intercarrier interference (ICI) resulting from time selectivity of the channel caused by the relative motion between the transceivers. Simulation results show the superiority of MR over its single resampling (SR) counterpart. Also, under total power constraint, AF-D-STBC (when only one source is activated at a time) outperforms AF-TWR-D-STBC, however, at the expense of less bandwidth efficiency. Also, AF-TWR-D-STBC outperforms AF-TWR (when one relay is activated) even though the former contributes more interference. Finally, to further boost the performance, successive interference cancellation (SIC) is used to extract the spatial diversity offered by the relays.