A high accuracy solver for RTE in underwater optical communication path loss prediction

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new improved numerical framework to evaluate the time-dependent radiative transfer equation (RTE) for underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems. The RTE predicts the optical path-loss of light in an underwater channel, as a function of the inherent optical properties (IOPs) related to the water type, namely the absorption and scattering coefficients as well as the phase scattering function (PSF). We reach the simulation performance based on an improvement of the finite difference scheme proposed in [1] as well as an enhancement of the quadrature method aiming to calculate the integral term of the RTE [2]. Additionally, we evaluate the received power at the receiver plane in three dimensions by considering a given receiver aperture and a field of view (FOV). Finally, we evaluate the UOWC system's bit error rate performance metric as a function of the propagation distance, and time.