Diversity Analysis of Multi-Aperture UWOC System over EGG Channel with Pointing Errors

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of multi-aperture underwater wireless optical communication systems under oceanic turbulence modeled by the EGG distribution, deriving outage probabilities and diversity order for different combining schemes.

Contribution

It provides the first analytical outage probability expressions and diversity analysis for multi-aperture UWOC systems over EGG channels with pointing errors.

Findings

Exact outage probability for selection combining derived.

Upper bound on outage probability for maximum ratio combining obtained.

Diversity order of the system analytically determined.

Abstract

Single aperture reception for underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is insufficient to deal with oceanic turbulence caused by the combined effect of temperature gradient and air bubbles. This paper analyzes the performance of multi-aperture reception for UWOC under channel irradiance fluctuations characterized by the mixture exponential generalized gamma (EGG) distribution. We analyze the system performance by employing both selection combining (SC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC) receivers. In particular, we derive the exact outage probability expression for the SC-based multi-aperture UWOC receiver and obtain an upper bound on the outage probability for the MRC-based multi-aperture UWOC receiver. With the help of the derived results, we analytically obtain the diversity order of the considered multi-aperture UWOC system.