Demonstration of 15-M 7.33-Gb/s 450-nm Underwater Wireless Optical Discrete Multitone Transmission Using Post Nonlinear Equalization

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate an underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system using a 450-nm gallium nitride (GaN) laser and adaptive bit-power loading discrete multitone (DMT). To enhance the system capacity, a post nonlinear equalizer based on the simplified Volterra series is employed at the receiver to mitigate the nonlinear impairments of the UWOC system. By combining the adaptive bit-power loading with nonlinear equalization, 7.33-Gb/s DMT-modulated UWOC under 15-m tap water is achieved at a bit error rate below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (FEC) limit 3.8 × 10
^-3
. The electrical signal bandwidth is 1.25 GHz, which corresponds to an electrical spectrum efficiency of ~6 bit/s/Hz. The capacity-distance product reaches 109.95 Gb/s-m in a single channel UWOC system with tap water. Compared with the linear equalization case, the system capacity at the FEC limit for 15-m underwater transmission is improved by ~18% with the nonlinear equalization. Furthermore, the impact of turbidity on the performance of UWOC system is investigated by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under different suspension concentrations of Al(OH)3 and Mg(OH)
₂
. The results show that significant SNR gains (>3 dB for transmission distance up to 11 m) can be obtained by the nonlinear equalization over a wide range of water turbidity levels representing “clear ocean,” “coastal ocean,” and “harbor water,” which demonstrates the robustness of the proposed scheme in various ocean environments.