Performance analysis of underwater vertical wireless optical communication links using selection combining

In this paper, we have investigated the performance of underwater vertical wireless optical communication (UVWOC) links employing on–off key modulation for selection combining based receive diversity schemes in the presence of underwater turbulence, pointing errors, and attenuation losses. Due to variations in temperature and salinity along the ocean’s depth, turbulence-induced fading affects the performance of the underwater vertical wireless optical link. The vertical link of the underwater medium influenced by a strong turbulence regime is modeled using cascaded gamma–gamma distribution considering multiple non-identical layers along with attenuation losses and pointing errors. We have derived closed-form expressions for the average bit error rate (BER) and outage probability (OP) for the link employing multiple detectors at the receiving end. The accuracy of all of the closed-form expressions derived in this paper has been validated using Monte Carlo simulations.