High-speed long-range multihop underwater wireless optical communication convergent with free-space optical system for optical internet of underwater things and underwater optical wireless sensor network applications

Abstract

We propose a multihop underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) convergent with free-space optical (FSO) system for an optical internet of underwater things (O-IoUT) and underwater optical wireless sensor network (UOWSN) applications. A closed-form expression of outage probability was derived for the proposed system using the cumulative distribution functions gamma–gamma and hypertangent log-normal for FSO link and UWOC link, respectively. The outage performance of the proposed multihop UWOC convergent with FSO system was analyzed over various oceanic water types (clear ocean, coastal ocean, and turbid harbor) and different FSO weather conditions (clear air, haze, drizzle, and light fog). The results also depict the end-to-end system performance for different pointing errors (strong, moderate, and weak) and varying the number of hops. The maximum link range of ∼2.5 km, which includes 2 km of FSO link and 450 m of multihop UWOC link (nine hops with each of 50 m clear ocean), is considered.