In this paper, the estimation of overspread, i.e., doubly spread underwater acoustic (UWA) channels of strong dispersion is considered. We show that although the UWA channel dispersion causes the degeneration of channel sparsity, it leads to a low-rank structure especially when the channel delay-Doppler-spread function is separable in delay and Doppler domain. Therefore, we introduce the low-rank criterion to estimate the UWA channels, which can help to improve the estimation performance in the case of strong dispersion. The estimator is based on the discrete delay-Doppler-spread function representation of channel, and is formulated as a low-rank matrix recovery problem which can be solved by the singular value projection technique. Simulation examples are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed low-rank-based channel estimator.
Keywords: delay-Doppler-spread function; doubly spread; low-rank matrix recovery; underwater acoustic channels.