Relay aided UWOC-SMF-FSO based hybrid link for underwater wireless optical sensor network

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs) connects underwater devices to communicate, sense surroundings, and transmit data. Acoustic communication faces bandwidth limitations, making underwater wireless optical communication-free space optics (UWOC-FSO) hybrid systems a promising alternative. However, maintaining sufficient power budget and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a challenging task, making wavelength translation (WT) from visible to infrared (IR) at the water-fiber-air interface crucial for reliable signal transmission. In this paper, we propose an underwater wireless optical communication-single mode fiber-free space optics (UWOC-SMF-FSO) hybrid link based on a photo-detection, remodulate, and forwarding (PRF) relay and intensity modulation-direct detection (IM/DD) scheme for 8 × 1-Gb/s underwater optical wireless sensor network (UWOSN). The PRF relay is installed at a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) to perform WT from visible range to IR. The performance of the sensors is analyzed for different water bodies and weather conditions of underwater and free space optics channels, respectively using metrics of Bit-error rate (BER) and Quality factor (Q-factor) employing Gamma–Gamma channel model. The simulation results show that forward-error correction (FEC) target BER of 10⁻⁴ for sensors is achieved under different water bodies and weather conditions. The results obtained from this study show that the proposed UWOC-SMF-FSO hybrid link is flexible, resilient to adverse channel effects, and can be a potential candidate for implementation of high-speed long-distance future IoUTs.