Direct Air-to-Underwater Optical Wireless Communication: Statistical Characterization and Outage Performance

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of direct air-to-underwater optical wireless communication, analyzing its statistical performance and outage probability without relay deployment, using novel mathematical models and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces new analytical expressions for the statistical characterization of direct A2UW optical links considering multiple channel impairments.

Findings

Direct A2UW communication can be feasible with acceptable outage performance.

The derived models accurately predict system behavior under various conditions.

Simulations show advantages over relay-assisted systems in certain scenarios.

Abstract

In general, a buoy relay is used to connect the underwater communication to the terrestrial network over a radio or optical wireless communication (OWC) link. The use of relay deployment may pose security and deployment issues. This paper investigates the feasibility of direct air-to-underwater (A2UW) communication from an over-the-sea OWC system to an underwater submarine without deploying a relaying node. We analyze the statistical performance of the direct transmission over the combined channel fading effect of atmospheric turbulence, random fog, air-to-water interface, oceanic turbulence, and pointing errors. We develop novel analytical expressions for the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the resultant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in terms of bivariate Meijer-G and Fox-H functions. We use the derived statistical results to analyze the system performance by providing exact and asymptotic results of the outage probability in terms of system parameters. We use computer simulations to demonstrate the performance of direct A2UW transmissions compared to the relay-assisted system.