Underwater acoustic (UWA) communications allow wireless transmission between the surface and the bottom of a subsea environment based on acoustic waves. The wireless acoustic link reduces the physical infrastructure cost compared to the cable-based underwater communications. However, underwater acoustic channel imposes severe degradations on the transmitted signal. Its propagation characteristics are widely different from those of the radio channel. The multipath propagation caused by multiple reflections on the bottom and the surface, causes intersymbol interference (ISI) which must be compensated at the receiver. Furthermore, by the movement of the transmitting and receiving platforms, the UWA channel is time-variant yielding Doppler spread which induces a compression/expansion phenomenon of the symbol duration, associated to a frequency shift of the signal spectrum. The objective of this thesis is to propose low-complexity communication techniques in the UWA channel, in order to remove interferences while ensuring energy-efficient transmission link. The reduction in complexity is achieved by treating interferences in the frequency-domain which minimizes the energy consumption of the transmission system. We first propose adaptive frequency-domain equalization techniques in a decision directed mode, in order to remove ISI and track the time-variation in the UWA channel. Then, we propose a single-user SC-FDMA transmission scheme with a uniform distributed subcarrier allocation and using frequency-domain interval guards, in order to improve the robustness of the receiver against the Doppler effect in the UWA channel. Finally, we propose an adaptive frequency-domain turbo equalizer using iterative receiver, which allows to significantly reduce the bit error rate over iterations. Note that multiple-input receiver is considered in order to benefit from the diversity combining gain to achieve a higher signal to noise ratio (SNR). Furthermore, equalization is optimized jointly with phase synchronization to compensate residual frequency offsets at the equalizer output. The performance of the proposed solutions are measured over real time-variant underwater acoustic channel in the Atlantic Ocean.
