A novel bi-directional communication approach for moving underwater sensor nodes in the turbulent water channel

In this paper, a novel architecture of bidirectional underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system has been proposed to interconnect stationary and moving underwater sensor nodes for diverse applications. To achieve the bidirectional communication, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and remodulation approach have been used in this work. The proposed bidirectional UWOC system works at 40 Gbps data rate for both downlink (stationary node to moving node) and uplink (moving node to stationary node). Two distinct wavelengths of 532 nm and 531 nm have been used for uplink and downlink, the main attraction of the proposed architecture is that both the laser sources are placed at the stationary node. The moving node do not have any laser source and it remodulates the signal for sending data back to the stationary node. Because of this, the moving node contains lesser components which results in cost effectiveness, low power requirement and light weight. The proposed system successfully transmits the bidirectional information at a link range of 40 m under pure sea conditions in the presence of distinctive air bubble populations. The observed bit error rate (BER) values are 1.89 × 10− 13 and 1.19 × 10− 04 for the downlink and uplink respectively at a link range of 40 m, these BER values are under the acceptable forward error correction (FEC = 2 × 10− 3) limit. The proposed bidirectional UWOC system is beneficial for the development of a high-speed last-mile underwater solution.