A Study of Spatial and Temporal Dispersion in Turbulent Underwater Optical Wireless Channel

Abstract

This paper presents a method of modelling optical underwater turbulence as a scattering attribute in simulation. This technique allows the spatial and temporal effects of this turbulent scattering to be accounted for in a way that treating it as a fading parameter does not. The half power beam-width at the receiver plane is shown to increase as turbulence increases in turbid harbour water. The impulse response of a perfectly aligned signal and that of a crosstalk component are compared for a fixed offset position. They show that, as well as an increase in delay spread, the relative effect of inter-channel interference increases when turbulent scattering is increased.