A design of Underwater Wireless Optical Communication system based on OFDM technology

The complex seawater environment will cause the absorption and scattering of optical signals, and the light will be seriously attenuated within several hundred meters of transmission in seawater. Therefore, the development of underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) has great limitations. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is suitable for promoting the development of optical communication in an underwater environment with the characteristics of high bandwidth and data rate. We propose and experimentally demonstrate an underwater wireless optical communication system employing 16-quadrature amplitude modulation OFDM (16QAM-OFDM) and cost-effective TO56 packaged blue-light laser diode (LD). Over a 10m tap water channel, we have achieved a 125Mbps transmission and the bit error rate (BER) is 1.71 × 10 ⁻³ , which is lower than the forward error correction (FEC) criterion.