SIMO detection schemes for underwater optical wireless communication under turbulence

TLDR

Underwater optical wireless communication is affected by scattering, absorption, and optical turbulence, yet most prior work has focused only on scattering and absorption, while turbulence can severely degrade performance. The study aims to characterize a UOWC channel accounting for scattering, absorption, and turbulence, and proposes a SIMO LED‑based receiver to mitigate deep fading. The authors use Monte Carlo statistical simulations to evaluate the bit‑error‑rate performance of the proposed LED‑based SIMO receiver. The results demonstrate that spatial diversity effectively reduces channel fading and significantly extends communication range.

Abstract

In underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), a channel is characterized by abundant scattering/absorption effects and optical turbulence. Most previous studies on UOWC have been limited to scattering/absorption effects. However, experiments in the literature indicate that underwater optical turbulence (UOT) can cause severe degradation of UOWC performance. In this paper, we characterize an UOWC channel with both scattering/absorption and UOT taken into consideration, and a spatial diversity receiver scheme, say a single-input–multiple-output (SIMO) scheme, based on a light-emitting-diode (LED) source and multiple detectors is proposed to mitigate deep fading. The Monte Carlo based statistical simulation method is introduced to evaluate the bit-error-rate performance of the system. It is shown that spatial diversity can effectively reduce channel fading and remarkably extend communication range.