Underwater Error-Free Data Transmission Based on Optical-Acoustic Cooperative Communication

Underwater wireless communication technology plays a key role in underwater applications such as environmental monitoring and tsunami early warning. This paper proposes an underwater optical-acoustic cooperative communication system, which applies optical communication to transmit large-scale data, and applies acoustic communication to provide acoustic-assisted signaling exchange before optical transmission and Automatic Repeat request (ARQ) during optical transmission. In particular, we design and develop an underwater Remote-Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipped with LED based optical communication and acoustic communication modems. The acoustic link is for remote control of the ROV in far distance. When the ROV is close enough, the optical link with 2Mbps can be triggered at a distance of around 10 meters. During optical data transmission, the acoustic link is applied to ack the lost data packets in the optical data transmission.