Effects of multipath distortion on sparse signal parameter estimation

Abstract

Shallow underwater acoustic channel is typically characterized as sparse channel and the sparsity has been actively exploited to estimate the channel accurately. However, distortion of the multipath signal components degrades the performance of sparse approximation and the amount of distortion is dependent on specific time-varying channel condition which each multipath encountered during transmission. In this research we measure the signal distortion of multipath components and analyze its impacts on the sparse channel estimation. Especially, we are interested in the effects of the spatial difference of the distortion on sparse approximation of the multichannel receiver data. To this end, we use variety of experimental data sets which have different characteristics of multipath signal distortion and analyze the relation between the amount of distortion and the signal residual obtained from sparse approximation. ？ 2013 Acoustical Society of America.