Transmission characteristics of the sound propagation is very complicate and sparse in shallow water. To increase the performance of underwater acoustic communication system, lots of channel estimation technique has been proposed. In this paper, we proposed the channel estimation based on LMS(Least Mean Square) algorithm which has faster convergence speed than conventional sparse-aware LMS algorithms. The proposed method combines $L_p$-norm LMS with soft decision process. Simulation was performed by using the sound velocity profile which acquired in real sea trial. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed method shows the improved performance and faster convergence speed than conventional methods.