Multihop underwater optical wireless communication system for internet of underwater things applications

Abstract

SummaryInternet of underwater things (IoUT) has garnered significant attention for monitoring and exploration applications in underwater scenarios. The interconnected devices used in IoUT have power constraint as batteries are difficult to recharge or replace. Multihop cooperative communication can help reduce the power requirement of a single node by breaking the long distance links into two or more high quality segments. In this paper, we investigate the end‐to‐end average bit error rate (BER) of the multihop underwater relay network. The nodes are connected to each other using optical wireless communication link which provides high data rates with low latency. Closed form expressions for average BER are derived for two scenarios: (1) where every hop channel has the same statistical behavior and (2) each channel is characterized by different statistical behavior. Further, the impact of channel parameters on the system performance is analyzed and discussed.