Simulation and Analysis of the Atmosphere to Ocean Optical Wireless Communication Channel Using Laser and LED

Wireless optical communication (WOC) through atmosphere-ocean system is advantageous in multiple applications such as underwater imaging, underwater communication, underwater target detection, marine exploration and underwater surveillance. The atmosphere to ocean laser communication link is strongly affected by environmental factors (atmosphere and oceanic scattering, ambient noise) and optical sources (laser diode (LD) and light emitting diode (LED)) and optical receives. There are several research papers which describe the effects of atmosphere and oceanic scattering on atmosphere to ocean optical wireless communication link. But limited studies are devoted to analyze the effect of different optical sources on the performance of an air-sea optical link. The current study estimates the channel loss of the optical wireless communication link using LED of different Lambertian orders. This current work has also simulated the spatial distribution of photons intensities at the receiver plane for LED and LASER by using Monte Carlo (MC) method. The MC simulation is performed using four simultaneous tracking threads with MATLAB parallel toolbox. The results of the current study suggest that the normalized received power achieved for a LASER source is high in compared to LED for certain propagation distance. It is also observed that the normalized received power for an optical link can be improved by increasing the Lambertian orders of a LED. The simulation results of the current study are useful to choose appropriate optical receivers for the coupled atmosphere-ocean system prior to build a functional coupled atmosphere to ocean optical (CAO) link.