Preliminary Investigation of Air-to-Water Visible Light Communication Link Under Strong Ambient Light

Abstract

In this paper, we establish an air-to-water (A2W) visible light communication (VLC) link adopting one green light emitting diode (LED) as the transmitter and one white LED as the ambient light source. The effect of the ambient light on the A2W-VLC link gain is investigated under calm and wavy water surface conditions. By transmitting a high-frequency sinusoid signal, we extract the variation of overall A2W-VLC link gain from the received signal in the presence of ambient light. The experimental results show that the strong ambient light can cause the saturation of photodiode (PD) and yield no communication possibility under calm water surface condition. Under wavy water surface condition, the effect of strong ambient light can be alleviated to some extent, yielding some communication possibilities.