Robust UOWC systems against bubble-induced impairments via transmit/receive diversities [Invited]

We systematically investigate the bubble-induced performance degradation for underwater wireless optical communication (UOWC) with different bubble sizes and positions. By using different transmit and receive diversities, we investigate the effectiveness of transmit/receive diversity on the mitigation of the bubble-induced impairment to the UOWC link. With the help of a 2 by 2 MIMO using repetition coding (RC) and maximum ratio combining (MRC), a robust 780-Mbit/s UOWC transmission is achieved. The corresponding outage probability can be significantly reduced from 34.6% for the system without diversity to less than 1%.