Performance analysis of polar-coded underwater wireless optical communication systems with partially coherent beams

Abstract

A polar-coded single-input single-output underwa-ter wireless optical communication (SISO-UWOC) system with partially coherent beams (PCB) has been proposed and inves-tigated over the composite log-normal fading channel with the utilization of beam spread function (BSF), which could describe the combined effects of absorption, scattering, and misalignment. The approximate analytical expression of the average bit error rate (ABER) in weak oceanic turbulence condition is derived and verified by Monte Carlo simulation. The effects of PCB and oceanic turbulence parameters on the ABER performance of this UWOC system is studied in detail. Polar codes are also adopted to improve the ABER performance of this system. Results show that the PCB-based UWOC system with polar codes can obtain a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of approximately 11 dB compared with that of the system without coding. This work will benefit the design and research of UWOC system with PCB.