1 research outputs found
Statistical Studies of Fading in Underwater Wireless Optical Channels in the Presence of Air Bubble, Temperature, and Salinity Random Variations (Long Version)
Optical signal propagation through underwater channels is affected by three
main degrading phenomena, namely absorption, scattering, and fading. In this
paper, we experimentally study the statistical distribution of intensity
fluctuations in underwater wireless optical channels with random temperature
and salinity variations as well as the presence of air bubbles. In particular,
we define different scenarios to produce random fluctuations on the water
refractive index across the propagation path, and then examine the accuracy of
various statistical distributions in terms of their goodness of fit to the
experimental data. We also obtain the channel coherence time to address the
average period of fading temporal variations. The scenarios under consideration
cover a wide range of scintillation index from weak to strong turbulence.
Moreover, the effects of beam-collimator at the transmitter side and aperture
averaging lens at the receiver side are experimentally investigated. We show
that the use of a transmitter beam-collimator and/or a receiver aperture
averaging lens suits single-lobe distributions such that the generalized Gamma
and exponential Weibull distributions can excellently match the histograms of
the acquired data. Our experimental results further reveal that the channel
coherence time is on the order of seconds and larger which implies to
the slow fading turbulent channels