(POSTER) A Software-Defined Underwater Visible Light Communication Testbed

Underwater Visible Light Communication (VLC) uses lasers or LEDs can be used for wireless sensor networks and robotic networks. Compared with underwater acoustic communication and radio frequency communication, VLC has its unique advantages in high data rates and low latency. In this paper, a fully reconfigurable low-cost VLC testbed is designed for underwater communication. The testbed uses a green laser as the transmitter. USRP is utilized to collect the received signals, which are processed in MATLAB. A demodulation algorithm is designed and Bit-Error-Rate (BER) is measured under various conditions. The results indicate that reliable communication can be achieved in the absence of some high-cost elements from typical VLC testbeds. The communication system provides an average BER of 5.5×10−3 with a data rate of 4 Mbps.