The union of time reversal and turbo equalization on underwater acoustic communication

A receiver scheme combing time reversal processing with turbo equalization (TE) is presented for underwater acoustic communication. Time reversal processing is a means of refocusing signal that has been spread in time domain, which significantly mitigates the inter-symbol interference caused by multipath underwater environments. Turbo equalization (TE) based on channel estimation performs well against residual inter-symbol interferences after the time reversal processing. This scheme has a low complexity with multiple elements. Due to the time reversal processing, the number of equalizer taps in this scheme is 15 percents of that in direct adaptive turbo equalizer without performance degradation.