Performance evaluation of re-configurable intelligent surface-assisted underwater and free-space wireless optical communication in the skip-zones

Abstract

Note that 40% of the world’s population, $i.e.,$ three billion people, live within 100 km of the ocean or seashore surfaces. To explore and experience marine life, human activities in ocean-based environments are increasing day-by-day. To make human activities safer and stronger, highly efficient and reliable wireless communication is crucial for conveying any unnatural things that occur in oceans. Exploring the vast environment is difficult because of its rapidly changing characteristics, which creates various levels of skip-zone, resulting in the loss of information. A re-configurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted optical link is employed to mitigate the effects of skip-zones and enable high-speed and efficient communication links. In addition to this, it is also necessary to convey information to the coastal line through a RIS-assisted free-space optical (FSO) link. In this study, we propose a RIS-assisted dual-hop underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC)-FSO communication system. For the proposed RIS-based dual-hop UWOC-FSO system, closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP), bit error rate (BER) for coherent and non-coherent type binary phase-shift keying, binary frequency shift keying modulation schemes are derived and results are corroborated with the Monte-Carlo simulations and asymptotic analysis.