Differential orthogonal signal-division multiplexing (OSDM) is attractive for underwater acoustic (UWA) communications because it can eliminate channel estimation, resulting in a substantial reduction of complexity at the receiver. However, when the channel is time-varying, it may suffer from serious inter-vector interference (IVI), which is similar to inter-carrier interference (ICI) in differential orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). To mitigate this degradation of system performance, this paper provides a novel two-hop differential OSDM system based on IVI self-cancellation. Although this method improves system reliability at the cost of losing data rate, it is easy to implement in UWA modems. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-hop differential OSDM system over time-varying UWA channels.@en

Orthogonal signal-division multiplexing (OSDM) is an attractive alternative to conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) due to its enhanced ability in peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction. Combining OSDM with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signaling has the potential to achieve high spectral and power efficiency. However, a direct channel equalization in this case incurs a cubic complexity, which may be expensive for practical use. To solve the problem, low-complexity per-vector and block equalization algorithms of MIMO-OSDM are proposed in this paper for time-invariant and time-varying channels, respectively. By exploiting the channel matrix structures, these algorithms have only a linear complexity in the transformed domain. Simulation results demonstrate their validity and the related performance comparisons.

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