Empirical Modeling and Analysis of Water-to-Air Optical Wireless Communication Channels

Abstract

Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is attracting significant attention due to global climate monitoring, military applications, and exploration to study marine biology. Optical wireless communication (OWC) can provide the benefits of higher transmission data rate and bandwidth by using unlicensed bandwidth and light-weight transceivers having low power requirements. However, OWC suffers from many limitations such as absorption, scattering, and turbulence, which become harder when the channel includes a water-to-air (W2A) interface. In this paper, we focus on the modeling impulse response of a W2A-OWC channel under different turbulent water surface conditions. We empirically evaluate the statistical behavior of the channel and show fits to probabilistic distributions to understand the nature of the W2A-OWC channels.