Effective Capacity of Internet of Underwater Things Networks Enabled By Multi-Aperture UOWC

Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is the underwater network of connected objects and systems that have a wide range of applications, ranging from undersea critical infrastructure monitoring and marine biodiversity observation to underwater surveillance. Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems, which are characterized by large bandwidth and high data rate, are a key enabler of IoUT networks. However, oceanic turbulence and pointing error (PE) are essential performance limiting factors for enabling UOWC in IoUT networks. In this paper, we investigate the quality-of-service (QoS) performance of multi-aperture UOWC-based IoUT networks while adopting the mixture exponential-generalized gamma (EGG) distribution to jointly model the oceanic turbulence fading and PE. To this end, we derive a closed-form expression of the effective capacity (EC) from evaluating the system’s maximum achievable data rate in the presence of EGG turbulence and PE subject to certain statistical delay constraints. Special cases of the EC for asymptotic high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes and loose statistical delay constraints are also analyzed. Through extensive simulations, we justify the validity of the derived EC expressions. Our numerical results also demonstrate that the multi-aperture technique improves EC in the EGC turbulence fading and PE channels, thereby supporting strict statistical delay constraints with a high data rate.