Camera based visible light communication system for underwater applications

Visible light can be used to implement an underwater communication link, as an alternative for the current acoustic based communication methods. This paper presents the design and implementation of a unidirectional underwater visible light communication (VLC) system where a camera receiver is used. Specifically, data is transmitted from a submerged system to a floating body. In order to characterize the performance of this system, we first model the channel under zero water turbulence conditions for different transmission distances. Also algorithms and experimental results of detection are discussed. Our results show that, the proposed system can only achieve low data speeds compared to traditional VLC underwater systems, where photo detectors are used at the receiver. However, reasonable bit error rate performance can be achieved using the proposed VLC system design. Hence the proposed system can be developed further and can be used as a successful alternative for acoustic based under water communication systems.