Sequence Design Technique for Accurate Timing and Cell ID Estimation in Underwater Acoustic Cellular Systems with a High Doppler

In underwater acoustic cellular (UWAC) systems, underwater equipment or sensor nodes (UE/SN) should perform downlink synchronisation and a cell search during the initial access stage using the preambles received from adjacent underwater base stations (UWBSs). The UE/SN needs to estimate accurate timing and cell ID (CID) using the received preambles, and synchronise with a serving UWBS, even in high-Doppler environments. In this paper, a sequence design technique for joint estimation of accurate timing and CID in UWAC systems with a high Doppler is proposed to decrease the receiver complexity and processing time. A generalised Zadoff–Chu sequence is proposed for the preamble design. This sequence is decomposed into multiple short sub-sequences to reduce the effect of Doppler shift on the timing and CID estimation. The performance loss caused by the short sequence length is compensated by combining the sub-sequences using the repetition property of the ZC sequence. The properties (autocorrelation and cross-correlation) of the proposed sequence are derived analytically in the presence of Doppler shift and compared with the simulation results. The simulation results reveal that the proposed technique performs better than existing techniques in both additive white Gaussian noise and multipath channels with a high-Doppler. It is concluded that the proposed technique is suitable for accurate timing estimation and CID detection in UWAC systems with a high Doppler.