Experimental Investigation of Turbulence Channel Characteristics for Underwater Optical Wireless Communications

The turbulence is an intractable issue for underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), and limited literature has been focused on the probability density function (PDF) of the received signal. This paper investigates the statistical distribution of the turbulence channel of the UOWC system using the proposed experimental setup in a water tank. Different turbulence conditions are generated by changing the temperature and the salinity gradients of the injected water flow. Some general distributions such as Lognormal, Log-logistic, Gamma, Exponential Weibull and Generalized Gamma distributions adopted for curve fitting are thoroughly compared. Furthermore, the coherence time of UOWC channel under different turbulence conditions is discussed as well.