Secure and noise-resistant underwater wireless optical communication based on spectrum spread and encrypted OFDM modulation

In addition to requirements on increasing transmission distance and bitrate, the study of underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is also facing limitations and challenges, such as interference induced by background noise, demand of higher receiver sensitivity, and communication security issues. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a physical layer secure and noise-resistant UWOC system based on spectrum spread and encrypted orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (SSE-OFDM) modulation, transmission through a 14.2 m sediment circulating water tank. Firstly, experimental results show that the required optical power ratio of signal and noise light (OPR) for QPSK signal under BER threshold of 3.8×10-3 is around -5.77 dB for a spectrum spread factor (N) of 100, with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of 19.06 dB. Secondly, without the background noise interference, the receiver sensitivity is also improved from -50 dBm to -62.4 dBm by using the SSE-OFDM modulation, achieving a maximum attenuation length (AL) of 19.67. Thirdly, physical layer security of UWOC can also be realized, which suppresses the SNR of eavesdropper to -3.72 dB while improving SNR of the authorized receiver to 17.56 dB under the condition of no leakage of keys. Additionally, analytical expressions for SSE-OFDM based UWOC performance are also derived, which agree well with the experimental results. Based on the analytical expressions, the maximum secrecy capacity Cs for SSE-OFDM based UWOC system under eavesdropping can be obtained by optimizing the intentionally inserted artificial noise power ratio and the spectrum spread factor N.