TONG Feng¹ XU Xiaomei¹ FANG Shiliang²

(1 Key Laboratory of Underwater Acoustic Communication and Marine Information Technology of the Ministry of Education, Xiamen University  Xiamen 361005)

(2 Dept. of Radio Engineering, Southeast University  Nanjing 210096)

Received Feb.4, 2008

Revised Mar.19, 2008

Abstract To overcome the performance limitation of multipath time-delay estimation posed by underwater acoustic sinusoidal signals, an approach incorporating the frequency-domain weighting of the highly oscillatory Nonlinear Least Squares (NLS) cost function with the evolutionary optimization was proposed to facilitate the accurate estimation of the multipath time-delay of sinusoidal signals. In the described method, the number of the effective multipath signals, which is included into the parameter method as well as the multipath time-delay and amplitude factor, can be estimated simultaneously thus avoiding the requirement of additional computation. The experimental results performed with numerical simulation and sea-trial data are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness and precision enhancement of the proposed algorithm.　

PACS numbers: 43.30, 43.60