IRS-Aided UOWC Network for IoUT Applications: Performance Analysis

This paper investigates the inclusion of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in data acquisition in underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems for the internet of underwater things (IoUT). The paper proposes a medium access control layered protocol that employs slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and code-combining (C-C) to support reliable communication between multiple underwater sensors and a receiver. A buoy-mounted IRS is considered to improve signal reliability and mitigate underwater attenuation, turbulence, and beam misalignment. The underwater communication channel is modeled using the exponentiated Weibull distribution to propose a framework for the outage analysis of both uniformly and randomly distributed sensors with C-C. The throughput performance of the proposed IoUT network for S-ALOHA and C-C demonstrates that system performance is well controlled by the reflecting elements, transmission distance, and fading parameters. Simulation results claim that the IRS-assisted UOWC significantly improves throughput and reduces outage probability under challenging underwater conditions.