Single-carrier frequency-domain turbo equalization without cyclic prefix or zero padding for underwater acoustic communications

A frequency-domain turbo equalization (FDTE) scheme without cyclic prefix (CP) or zero padding is proposed for single-carrier, multiple-input-multiple-output underwater acoustic communication. In the first iteration of the FDTE, the received continuous data stream is divided into consecutive blocks and a combined inter-block-interference (IBI) cancellation and overlapped windowing scheme is used to diagonalize each data block for low-complexity detection in the frequency domain. Since the second iteration, IBI cancellation and CP reconstruction are applied on each block to enable effective symbol detection. This work extends the authors' previous work on frequency-domain hard-decision equalization to soft-decision turbo equalization so that it not only retains high data transmission efficiency, but also improves the bit error rate performance with slightly increased complexity due to multiple iterations. Its feasibility and effectiveness have been tested by field trial data from the ACOMM09 underwater communication experiment. (C) 2012 Acoustical Society of America. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4763987]