A Proof-of-Concept Demonstration of Scintillating Fiber Based Underwater Wireless-Fiber Communication System

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel concept on using scintillating fiber to implement underwater wireless-fiber communication. The scintillating fiber couples the received optical wireless signal in to the fiber core and transmits it over the fiber length. Compared with that in the stand-alone underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) channel, the optical signal suffers from less optical power attenuation but a more serious multi-path effect generated by the distributed reception capability. To overcome the multi-path effect, a deep neural network based equalizer has been proposed in this letter. Results presented in this letter suggested that the proposed equalizer can effectively remove the multi-path effect. With this equalizer, a data rate of 250 Mbps was demonstrated with a BER of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2.77 \times 10^{-3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which is below the FEC threshold of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.8\times 10^{-3}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.