Enhanced Underwater Acoustic Communication Performance Using Space-Time Coding and Processing

Subhadeep Roy Tolga Duman Leo Ghazikhanian Vincent McDonald John Proakis
Department of Electrical Engineering Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-5706 Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, San Diego

Abstract Recent advances in information theory and terrestrial wireless communication show that signicant performance gains are achievable with increased signaling diversity through the use of multiple transmit and receive arrays. An effective approach for increasing data rate over wireless channels is to employ coding techniques appropriate for multiple transmit antennas, namely space-time coding. This paper investigates the feasibility and effectiveness of space-time trellis and layered space-time codes for the shallow-water, acoustic, frequencyselective channel. Using data collected during a recent experiment in the Mediterranean, we show that systems using multiple transmit and receive transducers outperform more conventional single-transmit single-receiver congurations.

I. I NTRODUCTION Recent information theoretic studies [1], [2] have shown that signicant capacity improvement is possible with the use of multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) systems, as opposed to the more conventional single-input, single-output (SISO) systems. As an example, for a system employing transmit and receive antennas over a at Rayleigh fading channel, the information theoretic capacity grows linearly with the minimum of and . This tremendous increase in capacity, which directly translates into a corresponding increase in the achievable data rate, motivates us to investigate the performance of MIMO systems, for real underwater acoustic (UWA), frequency selective fading channels. Typically, UWA channels are characterized by fast temporal variations and long multipath spreads that cause intersymbol interference (ISI). The optimal methods for detecting signals impaired by ISI are the maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) technique and the maximum a-posteriori probability (MAP) technique. The computational complexity of MLSE and MAP, however, grows exponentially with the channel memory. Moreover, for systems with multiple transmit antennas, this complexity is also exponential in the number of transmit antennas. The high complexity of systems with a large number of transmitters and a long ISI span renders the optimal detection practically infeasible, thereby requiring sub-optimal low-complexity techniques.
Dr. John Proakis is an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego.

In this paper, we consider the MIMO communication scenario for frequency selective, shallow-water, UWA channels by using space-time coding at the transmitter, and MIMO decision feedback equalization at the receiver. In particular, we consider the use the space-time trellis codes (STTC) [3] and layered space-time codes (LSTC) [4]. The receiver consists of a MIMO decision feedback equalizer (DFE) [5], which is an extension of the structure rst proposed in [6] for SISO systems. The structure consists of an explicit phasetracking and timing-recovery loop for each link of the system (from each transmitter to each receiver), whose operation is jointly optimized with the equalizer coefcients. For the case of STTC, we propose a modication of the above structure, which facilitates joint equalization and decoding of STTC. The proposed structure strives to utilize the powerful trellis structure of the STTC in the equalization process, and reduce error propagation effects inherent in the DFE. For the case of layered space-time codes, we extend the structure proposed in [7] for MIMO systems and perform iterative (turbo) equalization. By successfully decoding several MIMO data sets obtained in the Mediterranean sea, we demonstrate: ( ) the feasibility of MIMO systems and space-time coding for shallow-water, UWA channels over a range of km to km and ( ) show that MIMO systems can achieve considerable performance improvement over SISO systems, both in terms of added signaling diversity and increased data rate. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: We describe the system model and the jointly optimized MIMO DFE structure in Section II. In Section III we describe the space-time trellis codes briey and outline the proposed receiver structure with the embedded STTC decoder using the modied Viterbi algorithm. Section IV talks about MIMO communication using LSTC and also describes the extension of the iterative DFE structure [7] for MIMO systems. We present experimental results in Section V and conclusions in Section VI. II. MIMO-DFE A. System Model
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banks, where the bank aims to equalize the data stream. Each bank consists of nite impulse response (1) (FIR) lters, one for each of the incoming received signal streams. The lter of the bank ( where is the space-time coded -ary symbol transmit) is followed by a phase compensator (de-rotator), ted from the transmit antenna at time instant , is which explicitly tracks the carrier phase variation caused by the transmit pulse shape, which is assumed to be the same the channel between the transmitter and the receiver. for all the transmit antennas, and is the symbol duration. While an equalizer, in theory, can compensate for phase The continuous-time received signal at the receive antenna variations introduced by the channel, this is not the case in after matched ltering can be written as practice. Particularly for the UWA channel, the presence of residual carrier frequency offset causes equalizer tap rotation, (2) ultimately causing them to diverge. Thus, the presence of an explicit phase compensator for each link of the MIMO system is essential for proper equalizer operation [6]. where, is the overall impulse response of the channel Each FIR lter in the feedforward (FF) section consists of between the transmit and the receive antenna, which a causal and a non-causal part in order to mitigate ISI due to includes both the transmit and the receive lters, as well the past and the future symbols respectively. Let the lengths and as the physical channel. The variables of the non-causal and the causal parts of the lter be are the corresponding carrier phase distortion and the delay and respectively, and let the uncertainty, respectively, while is the additive white FF coefcients be arranged in a column vector . For the Gaussian noise (AWGN) process at the receive antenna. data stream, all the column vectors, so formed, are Equation (2) indicates that, for a MIMO system over a stream as stacked to form the overall FF vector for the frequency selective fading channel, the transmitted symbols . The output of the feedforward section from each transmit antenna, not only experiences ISI, but for the data stream is then given by also co-channel interference (CCI) from the other transmit antennas. Thus the receiver has to mitigate the effect of both (3) ISI and CCI, while compensating for the rapid temporal variations of the UWA channel. The following section describes is the phase estimate for the channel between the the MIMO-DFE structure, which is jointly optimized with a where transmitter and the receiver, and second-order PLL to perform equalization and synchronization. The structure is an extension of the structure, originally . proposed by Stojanovic et al. [6] for SISO systems. . (4) .

 

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B. MIMO-DFE with Embedded STTC Decoder for Frequency Selective Fading Channels The STTC described above provides full spatial diversity of for at, Rayleigh fading channels. It has been argued in [9] that the above codes are capable of achieving a diversity order of at least , even in the presence of frequency selectivity. However, with proper code design, a larger diversity order can be obtained (due to the additional multipath diversity available). To investigate the STTC performance over UWA channels, we propose a receiver structure for joint equalization and decoding of the STTC. The proposed 3

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A. Space-Time Trellis Codes for Flat Fading Channels Space-time trellis codes are introduced by Tarokh et al. in 1998 [3]. These codes are described by a trellis structure; an example is shown in Fig. 2. The incoming symbol stream is rst encoded using the trellis structure and the encoded stream is then distributed among the transmit antennas. The trellis is designed to provide the full spatial diversity advantage, . The example code shown in Fig. 2 is designed for transmit antennas using BPSK symbols and has trellis states.

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structure consists of a DFE with an embedded space-time trellis decoder, implemented using the Viterbi algorithm as shown in Fig. 3. However, the standard Viterbi algorithm produces symbol decisions with a certain delay, and hence is not suitable for use in the decision feedback process. Therefore, the Viterbi algorithm structure is modied to facilitate the generation of instantaneous (but tentative) symbol decisions, which are then fed back to the equalizer. Since these decisions are made using the powerful trellis structure of the code, they are much more reliable than the decisions made by a symbol-by-symbol slicer, and hence helps reduce the DFE error propagation effects. In the rest of this section, we outline the Viterbi algorithm for the sake of completeness, and then explain the proposed joint equalization/decoding algorithm in detail. Let , denote the soft equalizer denote the symbol outputs at time instant , and transmitted from the transmit antenna, corresponding to the state transition of the trellis, at time . The branch metric for each trellis branch is rst computed as

the entire block may not be necessary and tentative hard decisions can be made with a smaller delay). However, for a MIMO, UWA channel, which is characterized by rapid temporal variations, coupled with long ISI and severe CCI, this delay can be unacceptable. In other words, performing equalization and decoding separately can cause the DFE to suffer from excessive error propagation due to the unreliable decisions (obtained by a symbol-by-symbol slicer) being fed back to it during the equalization process. To overcome this problem, we propose a joint equalization/decoding strategy in which we feed back instantaneous, but reliable symbol decisions to the equalizer, by making use of the trellis structure of the STTC. The proposed algorithm works as follows: At every time instant , after the Viterbi algorithm computes the surviving branches, we compute the joint probability of each outgoing state , and all the equalizer outputs from time to time . This is similar to what is done in the BCJR algorithm [10]. This joint probability is dened as

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IV. J OINTLY O PTIMIZED MIMO-DFE WITH L AYERED S PACE -T IME C ODES Layered space-time codes were introduced by Foschini et al. [4], [11], for rich scattering, at Rayleigh fading environments. Unlike STTC, which tries to exploit the full spatial diversity of the system, these codes aim at achieving the very high spectral efciencies possible in a system with a large number of transmit antennas. 5

At the transmitter, the incoming bit stream is spatially multiplexed across the transmit antennas, whereby each substream, so formed is independently encoded, interleaved and mapped into symbols before being transmitted over the channel as shown in Fig. 4. Since independent streams are transmitted from each transmit antenna, the systems spectral efciency grows linearly with the number of transmit antennas. At the receiver, each receive antenna observes a superposition of all the streams corrupted by AWGN. For a at fading channel, each stream can be successively decoded by using layered successive interference cancellation and nulling techniques [4]. For a frequency selective channel, however, each stream also experiences ISI, in addition to the CCI from the other streams. It has been shown [12] that for a coded system, signicant performance improvement can be obtained by performing iterative (turbo) equalization. In other words, the equalizer and the channel decoder exchange soft information in an iterative fashion, thereby reducing the bit error rate of the system gradually. Several low-complexity alternatives to the above algorithm have been proposed, including the iterative DFE structure in [7]. In the rest of this section, we outline the extension of the structure in [7] for MIMO systems. The iterative MIMO DFE block diagram is shown in Fig. 5. The equalizer outputs for each stream are de-interleaved, and given to the soft-input, soft-output channel decoder. The decoder for each substream computes the log-likelihood ratios (LLR) for the corresponding information sub-stream, and the extrinsic information for the coded bit stream. This extrinsic information is fed back to the DFE for the next iteration and this iterative procedure is repeated several times. At each iteration, the DFE combines the soft information provided by the decoder from the previous iteration with the equalizer

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and a hard decision on overall is made to form the symbols which are fed back to the DFE. V. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS In October 2003, a shallow-water experiment was conducted in the Mediterranean sea, off the coast of Elba island to demonstrate: (1) the feasibility of space-time coded MIMO UWA communication, and (2) to illustrate the performance of several space-time codes over real, UWA channels. The space-time codes used were the -transmitter STTC (Fig. 2), and the -transmitter LSTC. Several SISO data sets were also transmitted for performance comparison. The SISO and the LSTC data sets were encoded with a rate convolutional code, with a generator matrix of . The bandwidth octal kHz available was kHz. The center frequency was and the symbol rate was symbols per second. Both BPSK and QPSK modulation schemes were used; although, the results presented here are for the BPSK data sets only.

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output of the current iteration, to form more reliable hard symbol estimates. The equalizer outputs are converted into corresponding LLR values by approximating their distribution to a normal distribution. Under this assumption, the equivalent LLR corresponding to the soft equalizer output can be computed as [7]:

Data was transmitted in bursts of seconds. Thus each burst contained 9600 symbols. The interleaver size for LSTC was coded bits, which corresponds to a transmission seconds. Ideally, for a MIMO system the power length of transmitted by each transmit antenna should be normalized, so as to keep the total power of the system constant. However, in this experiment each transmit antenna transmitted with the same power level as the SISO system. At the receiver, a -element receiver array was deployed at a depth of meters, with a -m hydrophone spacing. Before processing the data, the impulse response at each receiver was observed, using linear frequency modulated (LFM) probes, which were transmitted prior to each data set. The hydrophones having nearly equal strength response to all the transmit elements were chosen for decoding. The decoding results for several data sets are tabulated in Table I. We can make several observations for comparison of the SISO and the MIMO data sets. Comparing SISO with -transmitter STTC, we observe that both the data sets are decoded with zero or very few errors. However, the data rate achieved by STTC is twice that of SISO, indicating that, for similar error-rate performance, STTC is capable of transmitting twice as fast as SISO. On the other hand, if we compare the performance of STTC, with the uncoded SISO performance, i.e., the error-rate performance at the SISO equalizer output, we nd that the data rates are the same for both (since we are observing the uncoded SISO performance, there is no rate penalty), but the error-rate for STTC ( ) is roughly two orders of magnitude lower than that of SISO ( ). Thus, for the same data rate, STTC is able to achieve much lower error-rate performance than SISO. Next, we compare SISO with the -transmitter LSTC case. LSTC, we Looking at the error-rate performance of the observe that as the number of turbo iterations increase, the

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VI. C ONCLUSIONS

We have studied the performance of space-time coding, for MIMO systems over real, frequency selective, underwater acoustic channels. We have extended the phase coherent receiver structure proposed in [6], for MIMO systems and have proposed a new receiver structure for joint equalization and decoding of space-time trellis coded signals. We have also extended the iterative DFE structure proposed in [7] for MIMO systems. By successfully decoding several spacetime coded data sets, namely the space-time trellis codes and the layered space-time codes, we have demonstrated the feasibility of MIMO systems over UWA channels. We have also shown that MIMO systems can be successfully used to achieve considerable performance improvement over the more conventional SISO systems, both in terms of added signaling diversity and improved data rate. SSC San Diego and the Center for Ocean Research (SAIC) will be constructing a 10-element, kHz transmit array and a 32-element receive array, respectively. This MIMO system will be demonstrated and used during the summer 2005 High Frequency Initiative Experiment off the coast of Kauai Hawaii. Several iterative receiver structures will be developed, including the layered successive interference cancellation based receiver and the channel shortening prelter based receiver, and their performance will be evaluated using the above system. Finally, in order to make the realtime implementation of the system practically feasible, lowcomplexity versions of the above algorithms will be developed. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This research was sponsored by the ILIR-04 program at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego. The experimental work was conducted within the ElbaEx Experiment as part of the ONR-supported High Frequency Initiative, which is a joint research effort with the NATO Undersea Research Center. Appreciation is expressed to the Captain and Crew of the R/V Alliance, to scientic and technical personnel from NURC, in particular to Chief Scientists Finn Jensen (rst half) and Mark Stevenson (second half). 7

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error-rate decreases gradually, ultimately clearing the frame in iteration. Interestingly, we note that the error-rate perthe formance is dominated by transmitter . This effect becomes more prominent for the LSTC case where we observe that transmitter failed to converge. This phenomenon was also observed for several other data sets, wherein the link from transmitter to all the receivers exhibited considerably lower average SNR than the other links, which may be due to the positioning of that particular transmitter in the water column or a malfunctioning transmitter. Since LSTC does not have transmit diversity and has to rely on receive and temporal diversity (coding), the lack of sufcient receive diversity caused the receiver to fail for the case. Nevertheless, with sufcient number of receive antennas (the case), the turbo equalization process is able to achieve error free performance (with an increased complexity), and achieve a data rate times that of SISO. In order to get an intuitive idea of the order of magnitude of the error-rates, let us compare the uncoded performance of SISO and LSTC. Note that, to observe the uncoded LSTC performance, we should look at the number of equalizer errors, only after the rst iteration (since subsequent iterations utilize feedback from the decoder). For reasons described above, if we disregard transmitter (a system), we nd that the SISO system has an uncoded error-rate of , whereas, the uncoded error-rate of LSTC is , uncoded symbols in (since each transmitter transmits seconds, and we are considering only transmitters) with LSTC transmitting three times as fast as SISO. Thus, we can conclude that for comparable error rates, LSTC can achieve an fold higher spectral efciency than SISO. Finally, we note that the primary experimental aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of MIMO systems for shallowwater, UWA channels, as opposed to achieving very high spectral efciencies. Consequently, the design of the data sets and the transmission parameters were carried out rather conservatively. For instance, the shaping pulse at the trans, which immediately mitter had an excess bandwidth of reduces the spectral efciency by a factor of . Similarly the symbol rates and the code rates were chosen to be somewhat lower than what one would normally implement. However, we observe that, even with such non-aggressive data sets, the spectral efciencies achieved by the MIMO systems are signicant. Table II lists the spectral efciencies (bps/Hz) achieved by SISO, STTC and LSTC, with BPSK modulation implies that no errors were observed (probability of error in a block of 9600 symbols).

Interestingly, these initial results suggest that, even with such modest choice of transmission parameters (excess bandwidth of , a rate code and BPSK modulation), the MIMO systems are capable of achieving better or similar spectral efciencies than some of the existing SISO systems, for similar range and depth conditions. As an example, data rates of kbps and kbps, over a bandwidth of and kHz, respectively are reported in [13] for a code rate of approximately . Comparing the results of [13] with our results, we note that we achieve better spectral efciencies with MIMO systems, even with BPSK modulation and lower code rates, thereby demonstrating that MIMO systems are very promising candidates for high data-rate, shallow-water UWA communication.
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Lastly, we would like to thank Dan Kilfoyle (SAIC) and Lee Frietag (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute) for including our waveforms as part of their MIMO testing during the ElbaEx Experiment. R EFERENCES
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