Performance of Vertical Underwater Wireless Optical Communications With Cascaded Layered Modeling

This paper investigates the performance of vertical underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems in the presence of air bubbles and temperature gradients. We consider a generalized UWOC channel model that contains $N$ layers, each having the same distribution but with different parameters to consider the vertically inhomogeneous nature of the underwater environment. To capture the effects of air bubbles and temperature gradients on channel statistics, we model each layer with a mixture exponential-generalized Gamma distribution. A closed-form probability density function (PDF) is presented for the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio. Based on the PDF, we derive the average bit-error-rate (BER) and the ergodic capacity. Moreover, we provide asymptotic BER and ergodic capacity results in simple forms. The performance and behavior of vertical UWOC systems are thoroughly analyzed, and all the derived expressions are verified via Monte Carlo simulations.