Underwater wireless optical communication; recent advances and remaining challenges

TLDR

Underwater wireless optical communication offers very high data rates over tens of meters but faces challenges such as high attenuation and localization‑induced link misalignments that affect availability and signal quality. This paper reviews recent UWOC research and commercial systems and investigates the performance of a typical UWOC system under simplifying modeling assumptions while highlighting practical open issues and challenges. The authors conduct a performance study of a representative UWOC system, modeling it with simplifying assumptions after surveying recent literature and existing commercial deployments.

Abstract

Because of its ability of providing very high data transmission rates over distances up to several tens of meters, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has attracted considerable interest during the past few years. The underwater channel is a challenging environment, especially because of its high attenuation. The difficulty of precise localization underwater also leads to unavoidable link misalignments that can have an important impact on the link availability and otherwise on the quality of signal transmission. In this paper, after a review of the recent research works on UWOC and the available commercialized systems, we present the performance study of a typical UWOC system under some simplifying assumptions for system modeling. We also address the open issues and the challenges that we are faced with in practice.