The Estimation and Compensation of Doppler Effect on Underwater Acoustic Spread Spectrum Communication

The Doppler effect is inherent in communication systems which makes the carrier synchronization critical to the whole system. In underwater communication environment, the Doppler effect is more severe due to the limited sound speed. In this paper, the Doppler effect of underwater channel is analyzed by formulas on a software-defined radio communication system. Then an effective algorithm is developed which can estimate and compensate the frequency shift. The simulation results show that this algorithm works out within the speed of 15 m/s, when the signal to noise ratio is above -22 dB. The sea experimental results show that the system can successfully achieve the carry wave synchronization with the speed to be 6 knots.