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The performance of an underwater optical wireless communication link is investigated by taking into account&mdash, for the first time and to the best of our knowledge&mdash, the simultaneous influence of the chromatic dispersion, the time jitter and the turbulence effects, by assuming chirped longitudinal Gaussian pulse propagation as information carriers. The estimation procedure is presented and a novel probability density function is extracted in order to describe the irradiance fluctuations at the receiver side. Furthermore, the availability of the link is investigated by means of its probability of fade and various numerical results are presented using typical parameters for the underwater optical wireless communication systems.

The obsolete communication systems used in the underwater environment necessitates the development and use of modern telecommunications technologies. One such technology is the optical wireless communications, which can provide very high data rates, almost infinite bandwidth and very high transmission speed for real time fast and secure underwater links. However, the composition and the optical density of seawater hinder the communication between transmitter and receiver, while many significant effects strongly mitigate the underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems&rsquo, performance. In this work, the influences of chromatic dispersion and time jitter are investigated. Chromatic dispersion causes the temporal broadening or narrowing of the pulse, while time jitter complicates the detection process at the receiver. Thus, the broadening of the optical pulse due to chromatic dispersion is studied and the influence of the initial chirp is examined. Moreover, the effect of the time jitter is also taken into consideration and for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a mathematical expression for the probability of fade is extracted, taking into account the influence of both of the above-mentioned effects for a UOWC system. Finally, the appropriate numerical results are presented.

Performance metrics such as mean-bit-error rate and probability of fade for free-space optical communication (FSOC) applications using intensity-modulation direct detection are theoretically calculated based on probability density functions (PDFs) describing irradiance fluctuations. Theoretical calculations using common PDF models can result in significant errors in prediction of performance metrics. In particular, these models do not consider the change in skewness of the distribution as the aperture size increases, and often positively skewed distributions (right tailed) are used to model scenarios where the true statistics are negatively skewed (left tailed). We evaluate the magnitude of errors in the prediction of bit-error rate and probability of fade based on simulation data for a collimated Gaussian beam in a realistic FSOC scenario for two strengths of turbulence and varying aperture sizes. The PDF models considered are lognormal, gamma-gamma, inverse-Gaussian-gamma, fractional exponential, exponentiated-Weibull, 3-parameter-Weibull, and normal distributions.