A blind multichannel combiner for long range underwater communications

This paper presents the development and performance of blind algorithms for a spatial diversity scheme to enable reliable data telemetry over a long range underwater acoustic channel. A number of Bussgang based stochastic gradient algorithms were tested for this multipath channel with additive white and coloured shipping noise. Both simulation and real experimental tests have shown that a significant improvement is obtained by utilising the spatial diversity of the long range channel and the ability of the combiner to perform joint equalisation and carrier phase tracking.