Acceleration‐Aware Estimation and Compensation of Doppler Scale for Mobile UWA OFDM Systems

ABSTRACT Underwater acoustic (UWA) communication systems are often subject to severe Doppler distortion due to the relative motion between transmitter and receiver. While conventional methods typically assume constant relative velocity, practical UWA environments frequently involve non‐zero acceleration arising from autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvers, drifting platforms, or environmental dynamics, which introduces additional time‐varying distortion. This acceleration‐induced Doppler effect results in nonlinear time scaling and frequency offset that significantly degrade receiver performance if left unaddressed. In this paper, a novel method to estimate and compensate for the Doppler scale caused by acceleration in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)‐based UWA systems is proposed. The proposed estimation algorithm leverages the inherent redundancy between the cyclic prefix (CP) and its replica in each OFDM symbol to extract phase‐based measurements without requiring grid search. A baseband‐domain compensation scheme is also proposed to mitigate both phase and timing distortions. Simulation results under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), synthetic multipath and realistic waymark channel conditions demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves accurate estimation and reliable compensation performance across a broad range of acceleration scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed method introduces no additional signaling overhead and operates with low computational complexity, offering a practical solution for mobile UWA communication in dynamic underwater environments.