Using PMMA Side-Glow Optical Fiber for Underwater Optical Camera Communication (UWOCC)

Underwater activities are becoming more and more important, and underwater optical-wireless-communication (OWC) will be needed. In this work, we present and demonstrate an underwater optical-camera-communication (UWOCC) employing long-short-term-memory-neural-network (LSTM-NN). The optical transmitter (Tx) is a PMMA side-glow optical fiber, acting as an “omnidirectional optical antenna” and providing wide field-of-view (FOV) light emission. By utilizing LSTM-NN, the bit-error-rate (BER) of the UWOCC system can be improved and the data-rate is enhanced to 2.7-kbit/s, satisfying the pre-forward-error-correction (FEC) threshold.