Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Based on DPSK Modulation and Silicon Photomultiplier

In this paper, a promising phase-modulated underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system with silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) based receiver is proposed for the first time and its feasibility has been experimentally demonstrated in a laboratory environment. The phase modulation enables the additional degree of freedom available for encoding of information in UWOC, given that previous state-of-the-art systems mainly employ intensity modulation (IM) schemes with direct detection (DD). In the proposed UWOC system, the information is encoded in the phase of light wave carrier based on differential phase-shift keying (DPSK). A highly sensitive receiver is built from SiPM, which is able to compensate the transmission loss and dramatically enhances the performance of the DPSK UWOC system. We experimentally show the feasibility of the proposed system at a data rate of 200 Mbps. For comparison, the commonly used avalanche photodiode (APD) based receiver is also tested. Comparing with the APD, the use of SiPM reduces the BERs by about two orders of magnitudes. The minimum required optical power for achieving a BER below the FEC threshold is about −40.2 dBm, which is about 11.6 dB lower than the case of APD.