Doppler Invariant Demodulation for Shallow Water Acoustic Communications Using Deep Belief Networks

--Shallow water environments create a challenging channel for communications. In this paper, we focus on the challenges posed by the frequency-selective signal distortion called the Doppler effect. We explore the design and performance of machine learning (ML) based demodulation methods -- (1) Deep Belief Network-feed forward Neural Network (DBN-NN) and (2) Deep Belief Network-Convolutional Neural Network (DBN-CNN) in the physical layer of Shallow Water Acoustic Communication (SW AC). The proposed method comprises of a ML based feature extraction method and classification technique. First, the feature extraction converts the received signals to feature images. An analysis of the ML based proposed demodulation shows that despite the presence of instantaneous frequencies, the performance of the algorithm shows an invariance with a small 2dB error margin in terms of bit error rate (BER).