Design and Analysis of an Optical–Acoustic Cooperative Communication System for an Underwater Remote-Operated Vehicle

Abstract

Underwater wireless communication technology plays a key role in the field of marine equipment technology. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate an underwater optical–acoustic cooperative communication platform for an underwater wireless data transmission system. The system utilizes an underwater Remote-Operated Vehicle (ROV) as a carrier, equipped with LEDbased optical communication and acoustic communication modems. In particular, the system applies optical communication to transmit large-scale data and applies acoustic communication to provide acoustic-assisted signaling exchange before optical transmission and Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) during optical transmission. By experimentally measuring the transmission distance under different water quality conditions, we found that the system can achieve a data rate of up to 5 Mb/s over a laboratory underwater channel of 7.6 m. By comparing the attenuation coefficients for the outdoor underwater environment with that in clear seawater, we estimate that the achievable link distance in clear seawater can reach 11 m with a data rate of 3.125 MB/s. The proposed system takes both implementation complexity and cost into consideration and also provides significant guidance for future real-time high-speed underwater optical–acoustic communications.