Underwater Optical Wireless Communications With Optical Amplification and Spatial Diversity

This letter investigates the performance of underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems employing optical pre-amplification as well as multiple receivers to exploit the advantages of spatial diversity. Numerical results are further provided to evaluate the error performance of pre-amplified single-input multiple-output UOWC systems when ON-OFF keying modulation is utilized. Our results reveal that the proposed system configuration can indeed offer significant system performance enhancements in terms of the attainable bit-error rate.

I. Introduction

Underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC) have recently received significant attention for both research and commercial use because of their ability to provide a much higher data rate than the traditional acoustic method within relatively short distances. However, the performance of UOWC is highly vulnerable to absorption and scattering of light by seawater, thus severely degrading the link performance and confining the achievable range of optical links to only few meters [1]–[3].