Feasibility analysis of line of sight (LOS) underwater wireless optical communications (UWOCs) via link budget.

Optical Wireless Communications (OWCs) are capable of handling large data rates in the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) at low latency to be suitable for real-time image and video applications. This paper presents communication link feasibility via link budget to determine the link communication range for three types of line-of-sight link configurations: point-to-point, diffused, and modulating retro-reflector link. The main aim of this paper is to present a more realistic power link budget which is developed to take into account the following: LED Photo Source Lambertian radiation model, Beer-Lambert pass loss model that includes absorption and scattering effects of water types, Spherical wave propagation model, photodetector which is modeled by active area model, transmitter projection optics (PO) gain and receiver collection optics (CO) gain. Moreover, this paper considers the effects of aquatic channels 'scattering and absorption by using intensity modulation direct detection IM-DD OOK, LED and LD–PS based transmitter, and SiPM-PD based receiver. The impact of different underwater environments, transmitter, and receiver parameters will be investigated on the communication link range. Its communication range on the order of tens of meters could be achieved by the three-link configurations. It is concluded from the analysis; that the line-of-sight point-to-point provides more communication range than a diffused line of sight. A diffused line of sight is used when it is required to multicast from a node to several nodes. Modulating retro-reflector provides moderate communication range and it is used when one party has more resources than the other one on the communication link. Medium distances are achieved by up to a hundred meters by placing multiple relay nodes between the source node and the destination node. The communication range is increased as increasing the active physical area of the photodetector and the transmitted power of the photo source. The communication range in both clear sea water and clear ocean water is higher than turbid water which is less since optical water suffers from higher attenuation. By using the multi-hop concept, an extended communication link range can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]