Reweighted Error Reducing Channel Estimator for QoS Enhancement in Wireless Nautical Radio Networks

Abstract

Maritime explorations may suffer from unwanted situations such as delays, insecurity, congestions, and collisions, etc., which may arise from severe environmental conditions. Thus, there is a need to develop proper techniques that will improve the overall quality of service (QoS) of marine users. This work aims to address the limitations of wireless transmissions over maritime communication systems using channel estimation (CE) by designing and verifying the performances of two estimators named inter-symbol interference/average noise reduction (ISI/ANR) and reweighted error-reducing (RER) for aggrandizing the quality of nautical radio transmissions. To show that adopting accurate and stable CE methods can considerably increase the QoS requirements of marine networks, the performances of the proposed estimators are analysed in comparison to traditional methods under signal propagations assuming both line of sight (Rician) and Non-line of sight (Rayleigh) conditions. The adoption of a reweighting attractor in addition to the introduction of a variable leakage factor controlled log-sum penalty function to our proposed RER estimator provides additional stability for the estimation of oceanographic channels. Results obtained highlight that the proposed estimator demonstrates a performance gain of over 1 dB at a data rate of 100 bps under severe fading environments in comparison to the customary RLS technique. At an MSE of 10-2, the RER method under slow fading channels show a performance gain of about 1 dB when compared to the traditional RLS method while similarly showing superiority gain of about 0.6 dB over RLS method assuming fast fading Rayleigh channel conditions.