Asymmetric Satellite-Underwater Visible Light Communication System for Oceanic Monitoring

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the proposed oceanic monitoring system that connects the oceanic life with the terrestrial life. For continuous real-time monitoring and ubiquitous coverage, the communication system is aided with a satellite link. Multiple sensor nodes (SN) are deployed at different water levels that collect sensor data and transmit it to underwater vehicles (UV) using underwater visible light communication (UVLC). The UVLC system provides higher data rates at lower latency as compared to existing radio frequency (RF) and acoustic wave alternative for underwater communication (UWC). The UWC system comprises of horizontal haul (HH) and vertical haul (VH) UVLC links modelled using turbulence induced fading. The vertical haul links are modelled as the concatenation of successive non-mixing turbulent links to take into account the change of turbulence with the change of water level. The UVs and submarines communicate with the floating vessels (FVs) using vertical haul UVLC link. The UVs collect the data from the low power sensor nodes and offloads it to the FVs, which further beams it to the satellite on the RF carriers. The novel expressions of performance metrics such as outage probability and average bit error rate are derived. Further, the performance of the system is analysed for various system and channel parameters to prove the feasibility of the proposed communication system.