Deep Learning-Based Signal Detection for Underwater Acoustic OTFS Communication

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a novel two-dimensional (2D) modulation technique that provides reliable communications over time- and frequency-selective channels. In underwater acoustic (UWA) channel, the multi-path delay and Doppler shift are several magnitudes larger than wireless radio communication, which will cause severe time- and frequency-selective fading. The receiver has to recover the distorted OTFS signal with inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI). The conventional UWA OTFS receivers perform channel estimation explicitly and equalization to detect transmitted symbols, which requires prior knowledge of the system. This paper proposes a deep learning-based signal detection method for UWA OTFS communication, in which the deep neural network can recover the received symbols after sufficient training. In particular, it cascades a convolutional neural network (CNN) with skip connections (SC) and a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network to perform signal recovery. The proposed method extracts feature information from received OTFS signal sequences and trains the neural network for signal detection. The numerical results demonstrate that the SC-CNN-BiLSTM-based OTFS detection method performs with a lower bit error rate (BER) than the 2D-CNN, FC-DNN, and conventional signal detection methods.