On the Performance of Hybrid RF/UWOC System

Abstract

A hybrid radio frequency/underwater wireless optical communication (RF/UWOC) system is considered in this paper. UWOC link provides high data rate and secure communication for various underwater applications, i.e. climate monitoring, underwater explorations and disaster management making it suitable mode of communication and the RF link increases the reliability of the system. The proposed system leverage Selection Combining of the RF and UOWC, which are represented by Nakagami-m and Exponential Generalized Gamma (EGG) faded UOWC link, respectively. Air bubbles, salinity, and thermal fluctuations in the water causes underwater optical turbulence (UOT) affecting the communication system. In this work, the outage and error analyses of the considered hybrid RF/UWOC system is performed. The error performance for different modulation schemes is analysed for the hybrid system. The outage and the error performance is affected by the RF fading parameter, the air bubble concentration, the temperature gradient, and the salinity of the water source.