Index modulation-based efficient technique for underwater wireless optical communications

Abstract

This paper presents and experimentally demonstrates energy and spectral efficient index modulation (IM) scheme for underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC). The proposed scheme utilizes IM with direct-current optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing which is based on discrete Hartley transform (DHT-OFDM) instead of conventional discrete Fourier transform-based OFDM (DFT-OFDM). Although DHT-OFDM has been previously studied in various applications such as optical and wireless communications, this is the first work that practically investigates it with the UWOC system. In this paper, we first demonstrate that DHT-OFDM can inherit all advantages of conventional DFT-OFDM with less computational complexity and higher robustness to the inter-carrier interference (ICI). Therefore, the DFT process is employed at receiving end instead of DHT to guarantee low-complexity frequency-domain estimation and equalization processing and ensure that shorter required pilot overheads are required to track the UWOC channel effects. Furthermore, IM-DHT-OFDM has been presented to provide better flexibility of spectral and energy efficiency (SE/EE) to UWOC and offers higher robustness to the ICI effect as the transmitted data is modulated and physically transmitted via some active subcarriers while others must be kept idle. For instance, IM-DHT-OFDM provides up to 50% spectral efficiency improvement compared to DFT-OFDM and DHT-OFDM with better performance over the UWOC system. Simulation and experimental tests, performed over 2-meter UWOC, are provided to demonstrate the outperformance of the proposed schemes against the existing benchmarks in terms of bit error rate (BER), achieved SE, peak-to-average ratio (PAPR), and computational complexity.