Bit error rate performance of underwater optical wireless communication with hybrid modulation

Abstract

AbstractTurbulence effects can cause performance degradation for underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) system. In this paper, a hybrid modulation (modulation–modulation, M–M) is presented to resist turbulence‐induced fading and improve the transmission performance of UOWC systems. The proposed differential phase shift keying‐multiple pulse position modulation (DPSK‐mPPM) is adopted as hybrid modulation to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance over UOWC turbulence channel of Gamma–Gamma distribution. Subsequently, the closed‐form average BER expressions of mPPM and hybrid DPSK‐mPPM modulation are derived and investigated, which are related to the oceanic turbulence parameters. The influence of the variation of anisotropy factor of ocean turbulence is analysed for the UOWC system over strong Gamma–Gamma turbulent channels. Finally, the numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed DPSK‐mPPM to improve the BER performance compared to the traditional single modulation over UOWC channel under the same conditions. Furthermore, the work of this paper improves the practicality of the proposed DPSK‐mPPM scheme for underwater communication in complex oceanic environments.