Lake Experimentation of in-Band Full-Duplex Underwater Acoustic Communications With a Receiving Array

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) communications is a promising technique to achieve spectral-efficient communication in the underwater environment. To achieve IBFD underwater communications, suppression of self-interference (SI) is a prerequisite. In this paper, SI suppression using physical separation and digital SI cancellation is investigated under different transmitter-receiver geometries. An iterative IBFD receiver combining joint channel estimation, SI cancellation, and multichannel decision feedback equalizer is developed. Due to the potential deterioration of the channel estimation accuracy, a digital SI cancellation control mechanism is used to regulate the suppression process. The feasibility of coherent IBFD underwater acoustic communications was tested in a lake environment. The two SI suppression methods, the SI cancellation control mechanism, and the receiver performance were evaluated using the experimental measurements. A bit error rate (BER) in the order of 10-2 was achieved at the range of 80 m for IBFD communications.