Underwater Optical Wireless Communication

The underwater wireless communication plays an important role in environmental monitoring, underwater exploration, underwater facility maintenance, and scientific data collection. Conventional radio frequency and acoustic waves critically suffer from strong attenuation in water and low data rate due to the propagation speed and large latency.

Optical waves based on diffused (LED) and collimated (Laser) lighting sources have been taken into consideration as an alternative solution to support much higher data rate over ranges up to several tens of meters thanks to their cost-effectiveness and low power consumption.

Underwater optical transmission can use collimated laser diode (LD) or blue/green light emitting diode (LED). However, the multi-path effect induces deep fades and inter-symbol interference. Moreover, wireless sensors deployed on sea floor are typically required to operate in low power due to the limited battery lifetime.

Therefore, it is vital to develop an energy-efficient high-speed underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems that are robust towards the fading effects.

Our UOWC solution provides >1 Gbps speed over the distance range of a couple tens of meters and suitable for variety of underwater applications such as:

  • Inter vessel communication
  • Underwater Robots and Drones.
  • Oil and Gas Rig and infrastructure.
  • Underwater labs and scientific research.
  • Equipment monitoring and Control.