A Diffuser-Based Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Receiver for Scintillation Mitigation

In this letter, a diffuser-based underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) receiver is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, to mitigate light intensity scintillation in dynamic UWOC channels. Experimental results demonstrate that the diffuser achieves more effective scintillation reduction, compared with the direct-reception receiver and the lens-based receiver. Benefiting from the proposed receiver, a 21-m, 100-Mbps UWOC link maintains stability in the presence of refractive index fluctuation induced by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$45~^{\circ }$ </tex-math></inline-formula> C hot water, consistently achieving bit error rates below <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>.