On Equalization Performance in Underwater Acoustic Communication

This paper presents the results of a practical exper- iment of underwater acoustic transmission, which was performed in Arraial do Cabo, RJ. The primary focus of this experiment is analyzing the performance of different types of equalizers, namely: zero-forcing (ZF), minimum mean square error (MMSE) and decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The mean square error (MSE) and bit-error rate (BER) are the figures of merit used to compare their performances. Results show that in terms of MSE, the DFE has better performance than the other equalizers, achieving an MSE of −25.6 dB for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) equal to 10 dB. Furthermore, the DFE outperformed the ZF and MMSE equalizers, improving BER by 5.3 dB with respect to the ZF equalizer, and 3.4 dB with respect to the MMSE equalizer.