Experimental demonstration of a real-time across water-ice-air wireless optical communication system

To overcome the transmission challenges of wireless optical communication (WOC) in extremely cold environments, an across water-ice-air WOC system is proposed and demonstrated in this paper. A real-time cross-ice WOC transmitter and receiver pair was prototyped and experimentally operated in relevant laboratory and field environments. Under laboratory conditions, error-free transmission was achieved across a channel comprising 0.3 m of artificial seawater, a 0.5 m thick Arctic ice core, and an additional attenuation of 10 dB. Furthermore, we successfully achieved 1 Mbps on-off keying (OOK) signal transmission over 11.18 m of water and 0.63 m of ice in a field experiment at the ice-covered Zadun Reservoir. To the best of our knowledge, these measurements represent the first real-time cross-ice WOC system demonstration reported to date, achieving the longest transmission distance through an ice medium.