Abstract
Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) can offer reliable and secure connectivity for enabling future internet-of-underwater-things (IoUT), owing to its unlicensed spectrum and high transmission speed. However, a critical bottleneck lies in the strict requirement of pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT), for effective recovery of modulated optical signals at the receiver end. A large-area, high bandwidth, and wide-angle-of-view photoreceiver is therefore crucial for establishing a high-speed yet reliable communication link under non-directional pointing in a turbulent underwater environment. In this work, we demonstrated a large-area, of up to a few tens of cm2, photoreceiver design based on ultraviolet(UV)-to-blue color-converting plastic scintillating fibers, and yet offering high 3-dB bandwidth of up to 86.13 MHz. Tapping on the large modulation bandwidth, we demonstrated a high data rate of 250 Mbps at bit-error ratio (BER) of 2.2 × 10-3 using non-return-to-zero on-off keying (NRZ-OOK) pseudorandom binary sequence (PRBS) 210-1 data stream, a 375-nm laser-based communication link over the 1.15-m water channel. This proof-of-concept demonstration opens the pathway for revolutionizing the photodetection scheme in UWOC, and for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) free-space optical communication.
Highlights
In recent years, visible light communication (VLC) had progressed tremendously with up to multi-Gbps data rates demonstrated [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
The laser diodes (LDs) is connected to the output channel of a vector network analyzer (VNA) (Agilent, E8361C)
We reported the design of a 36-cm2 large-area UV-to-blue scintillating-fiber-based photoreceiver with a 3-dB bandwidth of 86.13 MHz suitable for UV-based underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) applications
Summary
Visible light communication (VLC) had progressed tremendously with up to multi-Gbps data rates demonstrated [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Acoustic communication is the dominant technique for UWOC links of up to a few tens of kilometers [12,15] It suffers from low modulation frequencies due to strong attenuation of sound waves in the water, and limiting the data rate to only a few tens of kbps. RF communication in the underwater environment is limited by the high conductivity of seawater that attenuates the radio waves [16,17] To circumvent these issues, UWOC has been proposed as an alternative solution to provide a reliable and stable real-time high-data-rate transmission of up to Gbps in the underwater environment with distances of up to hundreds of meters long [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]
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