The Investigation of Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Links Using the Total Reflection at the Air-Water Interface in the Presence of Waves

With the development of underwater exploration, underwater networking is in urgent demand. At present, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is primarily based on line-of-sight (LOS) communication links. However, the underwater environment is so complicated that LOS communication links are easily affected by a couple of factors such as air bubbles, turbidity, oceanic turbulence, and so on. We put forward novel UWOC links using the total reflection at the air-water interface, which can mitigate those phenomena. This paper aims to investigate a UWOC link based on the total reflection at the air-water interface. In our work, we achieved the maximum data rate of 300 Mb/s and a bit error rate (BER) of 3.10 × 10−3 under the forward error correction (FEC) with the total reflection angle of 7°. Furthermore, we verified the performance of the total reflection-based UWOC links at the air-water interface in the presence of waves and evaluated the impact on the UWOC links when the frequency and amplitude of the waves varied.