1178 Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics Vol. 26, No. 6, December 2015
As an extension of the blind carrier frequency offset
(CFO) estimation method [14], using the energy on the null
subcarriers to find the best fit becomes a popular Doppler
scaling factor estimation method in UWA OFDM commu-
nication [15 – 18]. It is essentially an extremal problem of
the cost function formulated from the total energy of null
subcarriers. In [10], a two-step approach is proposed. First,
the received signal is resampled according to the Doppler
scaling factor. The factor is roughly measured by preamble
and postamble, followed by resolution of residual Doppler
which is considered to be uniform. The rough measure-
ment makes it only suitable for offline processing due to
the processing delay and complexity. The residual Doppler
is also frequency related when the carrier frequency is
low to achieve long range communication, where normally
the relative bandwidth is very large. In [15] the total en-
ergy of frequency measurements at null subcarriers of the
block is resampled with different tentative scaling factors,
thus the computation complexity is extremely large. As an
improvement, in [17], the cost function is sampled spo-
radically to find the rough place of the global minimum.
Then, an accurate estimation is conducted by the method of
steepest descent. However, it suffers from the conflict be-
tween precision and computation complexity, as the com-
plexity of resampling increases proportionally to the accu-
racy of the interpolation.
In this paper, a new efficient method of Doppler scal-
ing estimation is proposed. The cost function is formulated
from the total energy of null subcarriers through discrete
Fourier transform (DFT) instead of the resampling method.
The frequencies of null subcarriers are identified accord-
ing to nonuniform Doppler shifts at each tentative scaling
factor. Benefitting from that DFT has much less computa-
tion complexity than the resampling method, the proposed
method is more efficient. The cost function is investigated
and proved to be fitted by a quadratic polynomial near the
global minimum. The accurate location of the global min-
imum can be achieved through polynomial interpolation.
To verify this approach, an experiment was carried out in
Lianhua lake of Heilongjiang province. Over a bandwidth
of 4 kHz with a relative bandwidth of 67%, quaternary
phase-shift keying (QPSK) modulation and rate 2/3 con-
volutional coding are adopted. Excellent performance is
achieved when the relative speed is up to 5 kn, at which
max Doppler shift is greater than the OFDM subcarrier
spacing. The experiment results validate our approach’s
validity and effectiveness.
2. Cylic prefix OFDM over underwater
acoustic channels
Let T denote the OFDM symbol duration and T
g
the cylic
prefix. The total OFDM block duration is T
= T + T
g
.
The frequency spacing is Δf =1/T. The kth subcarrier is
at the frequency
f
k
= f
c
+ kΔf, k = −K/2,...,K/2 − 1 (1)
where f
c
is the carrier frequency and K subcarriers are
used so that the bandwidth is B = KΔf.
Consider one CP-OFDM block. Let d(k) denote the in-
formation symbol to be transmitted on the kth subcarrier.
The nonoverlapping sets of active subcarriers S
A
and null
subcarriers S
N
satisfy S
A
∪S
N
= {−K/2,...,K/2−1}.
The transmitted signal in passband is then given by
s(t)=
k∈S
A
d(k)e
jk2πΔft
e
j2πf
c
t
,t∈ [T
g
,T]. (2)
Consider a multipath underwater channel that has the
impulse response
c(τ,t)=
p
A
p
(t)δ(τ − τ
p
(t)) (3)
where A
p
(t) is the path amplitude and τ
p
(t) is the time-
varying path delay. To develop our receiver algorithms, the
following assumptions are adopted.
(i) All paths have a similar Doppler scaling factor a such
that
τ
p
(t) ≈ τ
p
− at. (4)
In general, different paths could have different Doppler
scaling factors. The method proposed here is based on the
assumption that all the paths have the same Doppler scal-
ing factor [10,15,17 – 19]. However, when this is not true,
part of useful signals are treated as additive noise, which
increases the overall noise variance. However, we find that
as long as the dominant Doppler shift is caused by the di-
rect transmitter/receiver motion, as it is the case in our ex-
periments, this assumption seems to be justified.
(ii) The path delays τ
p
(t), the gains A
p
(t), and the
Doppler scaling factor a are constant over the block du-
ration.
The received signal in passband is
˜y(t)=
p
A
p
(t)
k∈S
A
d(k)e
jk2πΔf (t+at−τ
p
)
·
e
j2πf
c
(t+at−τ
p
)
+˜n(t) (5)
where ˜n(t) is the additive noise.
Base on the expression in (5), each subcarrier experi-
ences a Doppler-induced frequency shift (f
c
+ kΔf)a,
which depends on the frequency of the subcarrier. Since the
bandwidth of the OFDM signal is comparable to the center
frequency, the Doppler-induced frequency shifts on diffe-
rent OFDM subcarriers differ considerably; i.e. the nar-
rowband assumption does not hold true.