Abstract
In underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC), scattering of the propagating light beam results in both intensity and phase variations, which limit the transmission link range and channel bandwidth, respectively. Scattering of photons while propagating through the channel is a random process, which results in the channel-dependent scattering noise. In this work, we introduce for the first time an analytical model for this noise and investigate its effect on the bit error rate performance of the UOWC system for three types of waters and a range of transmission link spans. We show that, for a short range of un-clear water or a longer range of clear water, the number of photons experiencing scattering is high, thus leading to the increased scattering noise. The results demonstrate that the FEC limit of 3×10−3 and considering the scattering noise, the maximum link spans are 51.5, 20, and 4.6 m for the clear, coastal, and harbor waters, respectively.
Highlights
In underwater environments, where we are witnessing a growing number of fixed and mobile devices, robots, sensors, etc., there is the need for reliable and advanced communication networks offering several data rates, low latency over a short to long transmission range for commercial, scientific and exploration applications [1,2]
In [19], the channel capacity for various link distances, water types, and transceiver parameters were evaluated using Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, and it was shown that the underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC) bandwidth for the clear, coastal, and harbor waters are in the order of hundreds of MHz, tens of MHz and MHz, respectively
These parameters are adopted to simulate the underwater channel for different water types using MC simulation and the results are used to determine the scattering noise coefficient for different water types
Summary
In underwater environments, where we are witnessing a growing number of fixed and mobile devices, robots, sensors, etc., there is the need for reliable and advanced communication networks offering several data rates, low latency over a short to long transmission range for commercial, scientific and exploration applications [1,2]. In [15], the 500 Mb/s UOWC system performance was investigated by considering the shot noise, dark current noise, thermal noise, and background noise, and it was shown that link spans of 40 and 10 m with the transmit power levels of 47 and 27 dBm for the coastal and harbor waters, respectively were achievable at the forward error correction (FEC) BER limit of 3 × 10−3. In these works, the scattering noise was not considered.
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