LED-Based Underwater Wireless Optical Communication for Small Mobile Platforms: Experimental Channel Study in Highly-Turbid Lake Water

Underwater collaborative work between small mobile platforms (SMP) such as divers, litter submarine or AUV, requires a high data rate communication system which is compact, reliable, affordable and eye-safe. The high bandwidth of LED-based underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is an advantage. Artificial, emulated as well as simulated, turbid underwater channel has been studied recently, but no practical nature water. To fully meet the requirements of challenging turbid underwater channel scenarios for SMP, we demonstrated a green LED-based UWOC system up to a bandwidth of 3.4 MHz in a highly-turbid nature lake water. Through a contrast wireless optical communication (WOC) experiment in air, turbid water channel is observed to compensates the receiving signal amplitude attenuates after propagating a longer attenuation length due to multiple-scattered light caused diffusion, and thus to be more like a single-input multi-output (SIMO) system. From our experimental observation, the SIMO channel model could be employed not only in turbulent UWOC, but also in highly turbid UWOC. Moreover, turbid water channel is observed a “frequency selection” effect, thus LED with lower threshold voltage at higher frequency would optimize bandwidth and link range, and a robust pre-code for interference cancellation would be a well-direct choice to constructing different UWOC system in highly turbid water for SMP. Our finding will provide a new reference complementing the current LED-based UWOC systems in realistic water environment.