Scintillation analysis of multiple-input single-output underwater optical links

Abstract

Multiple-input single-output (MISO) techniques are employed in underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) links to mitigate the degrading effects of oceanic turbulence. In this paper, we consider a MISO UWOC system which consists of a laser beam array as transmitter and a point detector as receiver. Our aim is to find the scintillation index at the detector in order to quantify the system performance. For this purpose, the average intensity and the average of the square of the intensity are derived in underwater turbulence by using the extended Huygens-Fresnel principle. The scintillation index and the average bit-error-rate (< BER >) formulas presented in this paper depend on the oceanic turbulence parameters, such as the rate of dissipation of the mean-squared temperature, rate of dissipation of kinetic energy per unit mass of fluid, Kolmogorov microscale, and the ratio of temperature to salinity contributions to the refractive index spectrum, the link length, and the wavelength. Recently, we have derived an equivalent structure constant of atmospheric turbulence and expressed it in terms of the oceanic turbulence parameters [Appl. Opt. 55, 1228 (2016)]. In the formulation in this paper, this equivalent structure constant is utilized, which enables us to employ the existing similar formulation valid in atmospheric turbulence.