Underwater Optical Wireless Communication

By Hemani Kaushal, Georges Kaddoum. IEEE Access, 2016

1,158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Underwater wireless information transfer is of great interest to the military, industry, and the scientific community, as it plays an important role in tactical surveillance, pollution monitoring, oil control and maintenance, offshore explorations, climate change monitoring, and oceanography research. In order to facilitate all these activities, there is an increase in the number of unmanned vehicles or devices deployed underwater, which require high bandwidth and high capacity for information transfer underwater. Although tremendous progress has been made in the field of acoustic communication underwater, however, it is limited by bandwidth. All this has led to the proliferation of underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), as it provides higher data rates than the traditional acoustic communication systems with significantly lower power consumption and simpler computational complexities for short-range wireless links. UOWC has many potential applications ranging from deep oceans to coastal waters. However, the biggest challenge for underwater wireless communication originates from the fundamental characteristics of ocean or sea water; addressing these challenges requires a thorough understanding of complex physio-chemical biological systems. In this paper, the main focus is to understand the feasibility and the reliability of high data rate underwater optical links due to various propagation phenomena that impact the performance of the system. This paper provides an exhaustive overview of recent advances in UOWC. Channel characterization, modulation schemes, coding techniques, and various sources of noise which are specific to UOWC are discussed. This paper not only provides exhaustive research in underwater optical communication but also aims to provide the development of new ideas that would help in the growth of future underwater communication. A hybrid approach to an acousto-optic communication system is presented that complements the existing acoustic system, resulting in high data rates, low latency, and an energy-efficient system.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a85ebaedcc1c68618e6cdada563f5c9f0d38187

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Citations in the corpus

Underwater Optical Wireless Communications, Networking, and Localization: A Survey (2018, background): “In [48], UOWC systems were reviewed in terms of modulation schemes, channel models, and coding schemes.”
Underwater Optical Wireless Communications: Overview (2020, background): “Table 1 shows the performance features (benefits, limitations and requirements) of the three principal underwater communication technologies: acoustic, radio frequency and optical [27].”
Internet of Underwater Things and Big Marine Data Analytics—A Comprehensive Survey (2020, methodology): “TABLE III DATA-RATES AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES IN UNDERWATER APPLICATIONS [8], [36], [56]”
Visible Light Communication: Concepts, Applications and Challenges (2019, background): “TABLE XII COMPARISON BETWEEN TYPES OF UNDERWATER COMMUNICATIONS, ADAPTED FROM [114]”
A Long Distance Underwater Visible Light Communication System With Single Photon Avalanche Diode (2016, background): “Although tremendous progress has been made in the field of underwater acoustic communication, its performance is limited by low bandwidth, high transmission losses, time varying multi-path propagation, high latency, and Doppler spread [6].”
CONet: A Cognitive Ocean Network (2019, background): “[4] summarized underwater optics wireless communication (UOWC) methods by discussing the underwater optical channel, summarizing various UOWC systems, and discussing the challenges of underwater optical communications.”