A Hybrid UVLC-RF and Optical Cooperative Relay Communication System
Mohammad Furqan Ali, Dushantha Nalin K. Jayakody, Moisés V. Ribeiro
Abstract
Underwater wireless communication (UWC) has become a significant approach that is used to explore the aqueous mediums through various underwater applications. It is also noteworthy that the collected data from underwater has to transmit to inland data fusion centers for further investigation and operating instructions need to transmit from the inland center to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to operate as per the real-time requirements. Therefore, a hybrid terrestrial and UWC setup is required in most of the underwater military and commercial applications. In this study, the two different dual-hop up-link hybrid underwater and terrestrial cooperative communication systems have investigated. A floating buoy works as a relay node to assist information transmission from AUV, and regenerated then forward information with the terrestrial based station (BS). The AUV transmits information through visible light communication (VLC) link with the relay node. Moreover, RF and Free-space optics (FSO) are used as a potential candidates for terrestrial communication between relay and destination of the proposed system models. Numerical results show that VLC-FSO combination has the superior bit-error-rate (BER) performance compare with VLC-RF setup in low SNR conditions regardless of the water mediums.