Shore-to-Undersea Visible Light Communication

Abstract

In this paper, a novel visible light based shore-to-undersea (S2US) communication is proposed. It considers various properties of both maritime and undersea environments such as wave height, wind speed, and absorption. A lighthouse transmits the signal using white light emitting diodes (LEDs) and this signal is received by a buoy that acts as a beacon to relay to the undersea receiver. The beacon employs the decode-and-forward (DF) method in such a way that green LEDs transmit the DF processed signal to the undersea receivers via the undersea optical channel. The performance of the proposed S2US system was first evaluated via simulations with the JONSWAP spectrum model representing the maritime optical channel and the Jerlov water type representing the undersea optical channel. The results show that the transmitted signal undergoes significant attenuation, particularly over the undersea optical channel. At the reference distance of 1.025 km with Jerlov water type I, a bit error rate performance of 10−4 is achieved with a data rate of 1 Mbps. The S2US was further verified with experiments in terms of received signal level on a laboratory scale. The comparative analysis demonstrates that the simulation and experiment results are in good agreement.