Experimental Demonstration of 55-m / 2-Gbps Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Using SiPM Diversity Reception and Nonlinear Decision-Feedback Equalizer

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is considered as an enabling technology with a mass of potential applications. The silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) exhibits a bright prospect for UWOC thanks to the traits of low-light detection capability, low-voltage operation, and superior operability. However, the performance of the SiPM-based UWOC system is severely degraded by the dead-time caused nonlinear response. In this paper, to mitigate the dead-time induced nonlinear distortion and explore the achievable capacity of the newly developed SiPM, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a 55-m/2-Gbps UWOC system by virtue of SiPM diversity reception and nonlinear decision-feedback equalizer (NDFE). The performance of NDFE is superior to that of the conventional decision-feedback equalizer (DFE), and NDFE with a pruning factor of 5 declares similar performance as that without pruning strategy, while the number of the nonlinear equalizer can be reduced by ~31.8%. Significant performance improvement is also obtained by the proposed scheme under different turbidity waters. The measured data rate is pushed from 1 Gbps to 2 Gbps with a receiver sensitivity as low as −41.96 dBm, which to the best of our knowledge is the largest data rate ever achieved using the off-the-shelf SiPM among the reported UWOC works. In accordance with the receiver sensitivity and the model of optical propagation in the water channel, the maximum attainable distance/data rate is predicted to be 147 m/1 Gbps and 128 m/2 Gbps with the proposed scheme. The research results are promising for long-reach and high-speed UWOC.