Research on Co-Channel Interference Cancellation for Underwater Acoustic MIMO Communications

Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems utilize multiple transmitters to send different pieces of information in parallel. This offers a promising way to communicate at a high data rate over bandwidth-limited underwater acoustic channels. However, underwater acoustic MIMO communication not only suffers from serious inter-symbol interference, but also critical co-channel interference (CoI), both of which degrade the communication performance. In this paper, we propose a new framework for underwater acoustic MIMO communications. The proposed framework consists of a CoI-cancellation-based channel estimation method and channel-estimation-based decision feedback equalizer (CE-DFE) with CoI cancellation functionalities for underwater acoustic MIMO communication. We introduce a new channel estimation model that projects the received signal to a specific subspace where the interference is free; therefore, the CoI is cancelled. We also introduce a CE-DFE with CoI cancellation by appending some filters from traditional CE-DFE. In addition, the traditional direct adaptive decision feedback equalization (DA-DFE) method and the proposed method are compared in terms of communication performance and computational complexity. Finally, the sea trial experiment demonstrates the effectiveness and merits of the proposed method. The proposed method achieves a more than 1 dB of output SNR over traditional DA-DFE, and is less sensitive to parameters. The proposed method provides a new approach to the design of robust underwater acoustic MODEM.