Investigation of Underwater Optical Wireless Communications with Turbulence

Turbulence is due to the random variations of the refractive index of the medium (in this case water), which leads to fluctuation or fading of the received light intensity. In wireless communications including underwater optical wireless communications the link performance is greatly affected. In this paper, we investigate the effect of turbulence on the probability density function (PDF) of the received light intensity. We show that lognormal and negative exponential distributions are fitted well with the PDFs of the received light intensity in weak-to-strong and saturated turbulence regimes. The goodness of fit test is performed to validate the conformity of these two distributions with the simulation results. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of the divergence angle of the Gaussian beam transmitter, the receiver’s aperture diameter and field of view on the scintillation index.