Underwater Optical Communications Channel Models: Trends and Challenges

Dear Colleagues,

Underwater wireless communications refer to data transmission in unguided water environment through wireless carriers, i.e., radio-frequency (RF) wave, acoustic wave, and optical wave. In comparison to RF and acoustic counterparts, underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) can provide a much higher transmission bandwidth and much higher data rate. In recent years, many potential applications of UOWC systems have been proposed for environmental monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster precaution, and military operations. However, UOWC systems also suffer from severe absorption and scattering introduced by underwater channels. Together with the absorption and scattering, underwater optical tur­bulence is also one of the most important physical events that prevent the optical waves to propagate long distances in underwater media. Various effects of underwater turbulence on the propagating optical wave, thus on the receive optical signal are studied. These effects sub­stantially degrade the performance of UOWC links operating in underwater medium. In addition to single channel UOWC systems, multi-channel technologies, such as MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and OAM (Orbital Angular Momentum), are recommended to overcome turbuelnce-induced fading or enlarge the capacity with channel multiplexing. Such multi-channel modeling plays an importante role in the UOWC design.

This Special Issue aims at presenting an overview of UOWC channel modeling, recent progress, and furture trends. We welcome broad, visionary contributions of research reports as well as collection of reviews of accomplishments. We are excited to invite researchers to submit their contributions to this Spectial Issue.

Dr. Xiang Yi
Dr. Yuhan Dong
Guest Editors

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