A New Hardware Design Scheme of Symbol Synchronization for an Underwater Acoustic Receiver

Conventional time domain symbol synchronizer uses static predefined threshold to evaluate the level of environment noise and extract synchronization signal, but is less feasible to apply in underwater acoustic channel because of the great delay and noise variance make the threshold definition inaccurate. The paper provides a new hardware scheme using real time orthogonal sliding correlation as adaptive threshold to build a symbol synchronizer suitable for an underwater FSK acoustic receiver. The design has been implemented and evaluated on FPGA board. Both the simulation and real data experimental results show that the design provides accurate synchronization which consumes 9% of resources slices.