Experimental Performance Analysis of Underwater Optical Wireless Communication Systems

Underwater wireless communication is a domain of growing interest due to its exclusive applications in oceanography, commercial marine applications, defense, etc. Due to the high data rate requirement for most real-time applications, underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) has emerged as a promising research domain. Typical UOWC links provide a very high data rate across short-range. This paper discusses the development of an underwater channel model and simulation of the same for different seawater conditions. From the simulation results, the attenuation properties of various underwater channels are studied. An experiment is also set up to analyze the attenuation characteristics using lasers of 520 nm and 650 nm wavelengths at 1Gbit/s data rate. The setup is also used to do a real-time text chat through an underwater channel of 3 m distance at 2.3 Mbit/s data rate.