Study of Performance Enhancement in Underwater Optical Wireless Communication System

Underwater optical wireless communication has many plausible applications, but the biggest challenge is the communication medium that is water. Water characteristic changes from place to place. Due to high absorption and scattering, link length is limited to a few meters. In this work, we increase the link length under different channel conditions. For achieving this, we use a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) at the receiver and error-correcting codes (ECCs), namely convolution code and turbo code, in various water types to mitigate the channel effects. SOA decreases the power required at the receiver, thus, increasing the link length for the same bit error rate (BER). However, SOA fails to perform as water quality degrades too much, such as in a turbid harbor.In contrast to this, the use of ECCs can significantly reduce the power requirement and increase the link length. We have also employed both the models to achieve the desired performance at lower power and attain more link length. Simulation is done using MATLABO. Analytical results for SOA assisted system is also plotted along with the simulation.