Channel State Information Prediction for Adaptive Underwater Acoustic Downlink OFDMA System: Deep Neural Networks Based Approach

In underwater acoustic (UWA) adaptive communication system, due to time-varying channel, the transmitter often has outdated channel state information (CSI), which results in low efficiency. UWA channels are much more difficult to estimate and predict than terrestrial wireless channels, given the more severe multipath environments with varying propagation speeds in different locations, non-linear propagation paths, several-order higher propagation latency, mobile transceiver and obstacles in the sea, etc. To handle the complexity, this paper proposes an efficient online CSI prediction model for UWA CSI prediction considering the complicated correlationship of UWA channels in both the time and frequency domains. This paper designs a learning model called CsiPreNet, which is an integration of a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) and a long short term memory (LSTM) network. The performance is compared with the widely used recursive least squares (RLS) predictor, the approximate linear dependency recursive kernel least-squares (ALD-KRLS), and two common conventional deep neural networks (DNN) predictors, i.e., back propagation neural network (BPNN) and LSTM network using the measured data recorded in the South China Sea. To validate the efficacy of prediction, we investigate the prediction of CSI in simulated downlink UWA orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Specifically, the measured UWA channel is used in the OFDMA system. A joint subcarrier-bit-power adaptive allocation scheme is used for resource allocation. To further improve the performance, we develop an offline-online prediction scheme, enabling the prediction results to be more stable. Simulation and experimental results show that the CsiPreNet has superior performance than the existing solutions, thanks to its capability in capturing both the temporal and frequency correlation of the UWA CSIs.