A Novel Frame Synchronization Scheme for Underwater Optical Wireless Communication with Reduced Complexity

In this paper, we propose a novel frame synchronization method for underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems with on-off keying (OOK) modulation. Considering the frame structure that sync word is periodically embedded in the bitstream, the proposed method jointly estimates the sync word position, data sequence and channel gain based on the received signals in the period of a frame length. To reduce the implementation complexity, the original estimation problem is further simplified by utilizing the properties of OOK transmission. Simulation and experimental results both demonstrate the superiority of the proposed frame synchronization method over the correlation method. Specifically, experimental results show that the proposed method yields an optical signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain of at least 1.5 dB over the correlation method under dynamic channel with bubbles.