Characterization of Channel Impulse Responses for NLOS Underwater Wireless Optical Communications

Underwater wireless communications are becoming increasingly relevant, and as such the need to better quantify the corresponding system performance is an important problem. One valuable metric determining the system performance is the channel, as characterized by the impulse response. To this end, this work proposes a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) model to assess the channel behavior, which is based on Monte Carlo simulation and the Henyey-Greenstein model. Using the derived impulse response model, the performance of an underwater (UW) system is characterized and simulated for different water types and receiver field-of-view (FOV). For simplicity, an on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme is used for the computer simulation experiments. The obtained results show that the proposed NLOS model provides a sufficiently accurate and realistic approach towards characterizing UW channels with non-line-of-sight conditions, which should prove useful for analyzing and developing effective UWOC systems.