Impulse-Mitigation Kalman Filter for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Due to the complex underwater environment, underwater acoustic (UWA) communication system is one of the most challenging systems in wireless communication. The existence of interference is the major detrimental factor which constrains the performance of UWA communication. Impulse noise, introduced by nature sources and human activities, is the common interference in UWA communication. In order to mitigate the impulse noise, in this paper, we investigate an impulse-mitigation (IM) Kalman filter for UWA system. Different from the conventional Kalman filter, IM Kalman filter considered the effect of impulse noise, reduced the proportion of measurement affected by impulse noise to the final estimated state, and calculated the suitable weight for Kalman gain, which can mitigate the impact of impulse noise. Simulation results showed that the proposed method can effectively reduce the bit error rate and improve the reliability of the communication system compared with the existing impulse noise mitigation algorithms.