Analysis of TS-SLIPT for a Composite Underwater and RF Communication Link

This paper comprises the study carried out to analyze the performance a hybrid underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) - radio frequency link (RF) that utilizes one of the simultaneous light wave information and power transfer (SLIPT) technique for data transmission. The hybrid link is assumed to comprise of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that acts as the signal transmitter, a time switching (TS) SLIPT enabled communication buoy (CB) floating on water body surface which carries out energy harvesting (EH) and information decoding (ID) and an onshore data centre (ODC) which receives the RF signal transmitted from the CB. Such a link finds its utilization not only in commercial domain but also in military applications for communicating during land-sea operations. In this link the CB utilizes the harvested energy to transmit the decoded signal to ODC. Further the closed form expressions of outage probability and throughput of the entire AUV-ODC link were derived considering TS-SLIPT method at the CB and the results were compared with the simulations carried out. Further simulations were carried out to demonstrate that optimal TS parameter selection helps in minimizing the outage probability for a given data rate. The effect of optimal combined value of TS parameter and target data rate on the performance of the hybrid link was also demonstrated via simulation. The paper also draws a performance comparison between the power splitting (PS) and TS enabled SLIPT for the same set up of hybrid link. The simulations are carried out considering three variety of water types namely pure sea, clear ocean and coastal water.