Performance of an Underwater Optical Wireless Link with a Randomly Placed or Moving Receiver

Abstract

The current work investigates the outage probability of a vertical diffused line-of-sight underwater optical wireless communication link where a fixed transmitter at the sea surface communicates with a receiver floated below sea level, which may be still but randomly placed at a given location or moving following the random waypoint model. In both considered scenarios, the channel gain follows a random distribution making the problem mathematically challenging. Novel mathematical expressions are derived for the channel gain statistics for either random placement and mobility effects. Afterward, the signal-to-noise ratio statistics are extracted, assuming indirect modulation/direct detection at the receiver. Hence, the outage probability and the average bit-error-rate for on-off keying are readily calculated. Finally, some relevant numerical results are depicted in a series of figures to highlight the overall performance. © 1976-2012 IEEE.