Optical Wireless Underwater Communications: New Technology for Distance Increase

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Underwater communication is crucial for the exploitation of natural resources (e.g., fisheries and offshore oil), ocean monitoring (e.g., climate, pollution, earthquake), and search and survey (e.g., shipwrecks, mines, mapping). The underwater transmission faces various challenges, regardless if done in radio frequency, acoustic wireless, or optical wireless/free-space optical (FSO). FSO provides the means of transmitting at very high rates, having different applications, such as unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV)-to-UUV links. However, such a high data rate transmission is possible only at very short distances. One of the reasons is that the transmitter and receiver need to establish a point-to-point spatially aligned connection for a good detection performance. The goal of the proposed research activity is to overcome this challenge by integrating an intelligent motion control platform developed by Agile Sensor Technologies with FSO transducers in order to provide the capability of transmitting at longer distances. The new integrated system will be tested under different water conditions to verify its performance improvement when compared with the original system.