A Modified DFT-Based Channel Estimation Algorithm for Underwater Wireless Optical Links

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems can transmit data with high speed and wide bandwidth. However they depend on the accuracy of channel characteristics which are obtained by channel estimation. In this paper, we propose a channel estimation algorithm by detecting significant channel taps in traditional discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-based estimation and applying an adaptive noise threshold calculated by a variable smoothing equation. Numerical results suggest that the proposed channel estimation algorithm outperforms the traditional DFT-based estimation with fixed noise threshold for various SNRs.