Underwater wireless information transfer is of great interest to the military, industry, and the scientific community, as it plays an important role in tactical surveillance, pollution monitoring, oil control and maintenance, offshore explorations, climate change monitoring, and oceanography research. In order to facilitate all these activities, there is an increase in the number of unmanned vehicles or devices deployed underwater, which require high bandwidth and high capacity for information transfer underwater. Although tremendous progress has been made in the field of acoustic communication underwater, however, it is limited by bandwidth. All this has led to the proliferation of underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), as it provides higher data rates than the traditional acoustic communication systems with significantly lower power consumption and simpler computational complexities for short-range wireless links. UOWC has many potential applications ranging from deep oceans to coastal waters. However, the biggest challenge for underwater wireless communication originates from the fundamental characteristics of ocean or sea water; addressing these challenges requires a thorough understanding of complex physio-chemical biological systems. In this paper, the main focus is to understand the feasibility and the reliability of high data rate underwater optical links due to various propagation phenomena that impact the performance of the system. This paper provides an exhaustive overview of recent advances in UOWC. Channel characterization, modulation schemes, coding techniques, and various sources of noise which are specific to UOWC are discussed. This paper not only provides exhaustive research in underwater optical communication but also aims to provide the development of new ideas that would help in the growth of future underwater communication. A hybrid approach to an acousto-optic communication system is presented that complements the existing acoustic system, resulting in high data rates, low latency, and an energy-efficient system.

Underwater Optical Wireless Communication

Underwater wireless communications refer to data transmission in unguided water environment through wireless carriers, i.e., radio-frequency (RF) wave, acoustic wave, and optical wave. In comparison to RF and acoustic counterparts, underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) can provide a much higher transmission bandwidth and much higher data rate. Therefore, we focus, in this paper, on the UOWC that employs optical wave as the transmission carrier. In recent years, many potential applications of UOWC systems have been proposed for environmental monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster precaution, and military operations. However, UOWC systems also suffer from severe absorption and scattering introduced by underwater channels. In order to overcome these technical barriers, several new system design approaches, which are different from the conventional terrestrial free-space optical communication, have been explored in recent years. We provide a comprehensive and exhaustive survey of the state-of-the-art UOWC research in three aspects: 1) channel characterization; 2) modulation; and 3) coding techniques, together with the practical implementations of UOWC.

A Survey of Underwater Optical Wireless Communications

Underwater wireless communications can be carried out through acoustic, radio frequency (RF), and optical waves. Compared to its bandwidth limited acoustic and RF counterparts, underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs) can support higher data rates at low latency levels. However, the severe aquatic channel conditions (e.g., absorption, scattering, turbulence, etc.) pose great challenges for UOWCs and significantly reduce the attainable communication ranges, which necessitates efficient networking and localization solutions. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive survey on the challenges, advances, and prospects of underwater optical wireless networks (UOWNs) from a layer by layer perspective which includes: (1) Physical layer issues including propagation characteristics, channel modeling, and modulation techniques (2) Data link layer problems covering link configurations, link budgets, performance metrics, and multiple access schemes; (3) Network layer topics containing relaying techniques and potential routing algorithms; (4) Transport layer subjects such as connectivity, reliability, flow and congestion control; (5) Application layer goals, and (6) Localization and its impacts on UOWN layers. Finally, we outline the open research challenges and point out the prospective directions for underwater optical wireless communications, networking, and localization studies.

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Underwater Optical Wireless Communications, Networking, and Localization: A Survey

In this paper, we analytically study the performance of multiple-input multiple-output underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems with ON–OFF keying modulation. To mitigate turbulence-induced fading, which is amongst the major degrading effects of underwater channels on the propagating optical signal, we use spatial diversity over UWOC links. Furthermore, the effects of absorption and scattering are considered in our analysis. We analytically obtain the exact and an upper bound bit error rate (BER) expressions for both optimal and equal gain combining. In order to more effectively calculate the system BER, we apply Gauss-Hermite quadrature formula as well as approximation to the sum of lognormal random variables. We also apply the photon-counting method to evaluate the system BER in the presence of shot noise. Our numerical results indicate an excellent match between the exact and upper bound BER curves. Also, a good match between the analytical results and numerical simulations confirms the accuracy of our derived expressions. Moreover, our results show that spatial diversity can considerably improve the system performance, especially for channels with higher turbulence, e.g., a $3\times 1$ multiple-input single-output transmission in a 25 m coastal water link with a log-amplitude variance of 0.16 can introduce 8 dB performance improvement at the BER of 10−9.

Performance Studies of Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Systems With Spatial Diversity: MIMO Scheme

Optical signal propagation through underwater channels is affected by three main degrading phenomena, namely, absorption, scattering, and fading. In this paper, we experimentally study the statistical distribution of intensity fluctuations in underwater wireless optical channels with random temperature and salinity variations, as well as the presence of air bubbles. In particular, we define different scenarios to produce random fluctuations on the water refractive index across the propagation path and, then, examine the accuracy of various statistical distributions in terms of their goodness of fit to the experimental data. We also obtain the channel coherence time to address the average period of fading temporal variations. The scenarios under consideration cover a wide range of scintillation index from weak to strong turbulence. Moreover, the effects of beam-expander-and-collimator (BEC) at the transmitter side and aperture averaging lens (AAL) at the receiver side are experimentally investigated. We show that the use of a transmitter BEC and/or a receiver AAL suits single-lobe distributions, such that the generalized Gamma and exponentiated Weibull distributions can excellently match the histograms of the acquired data. Our experimental results further reveal that the channel coherence time is on the order of 10−3 s and larger which implies to the slow fading turbulent channels.

Statistical Studies of Fading in Underwater Wireless Optical Channels in the Presence of Air Bubble, Temperature, and Salinity Random Variations

In clean ocean water, the performance of a underwater optical communication system is limited mainly by oceanic turbulence, which is defined as the fluctuations in the index of refraction resulting from temperature and salinity fluctuations. In this paper, using the refractive index spectrum of oceanic turbulence under weak turbulence conditions, we carry out, for a horizontally propagating plane wave and spherical wave, analysis of the aperture-averaged scintillation index, the associated probability of fade, mean signal-to-noise ratio, and mean bit error rate. Our theoretical results show that for various values of the rate of dissipation of mean squared temperature and the temperature-salinity balance parameter, the large-aperture receiver leads to a remarkable decrease of scintillation and consequently a significant improvement on the system performance. Such an effect is more noticeable in the plane wave case than in the spherical wave case.

Zan Li

Papers

Underwater optical communication performance for laser beam propagation through weak oceanic turbulence.