Sparse Direct Adaptive Equalization for Single-Carrier MIMO Underwater Acoustic Communications

The sparse direct adaptive equalization technique recently received many attentions for single-carrier underwater acoustic communications. By taking advantage of the sparse (nonuniform) structure of a direct adaptive equalizer (DAE), one obtains a sparse DAE with improved performance and/or reduced complexity compared with its nonsparse counterpart. In this article, the sparse DAE is revisited with two contributions made: First, a comprehensive comparison is made for existing sparse DAEs designed with the proportionate-updating (PU) or the zero-attracting (ZA) adaptive filtering principles. The comparison concludes that the PU-type DAE outperforms the ZA-type DAE in terms of complexity, performance, and operability, thus shall be favored in practical use. Moreover, it motivates the design of a sparse DAE, named the selective ZA improved proportionate normalized least mean squares DAE (SZA-IPNLMS-DAE), based on the combination of the PU and ZA principles. The SZA-IPNLMS-DAE outperforms existing sparse DAEs armed with only one sparsity-promoting mechanism; second, a partial tap update (PTU) scheme via hard thresholding is introduced to sparse DAEs for reducing their complexity without sacrificing performance. The resulting low-complexity and high-performance sparse PTU-DAE schemes are strong candidates for single-carrier UWA communications. Experimental results of multiple-input multiple-output UWA communications are presented to corroborate all above claims.