Experimental Investigation of Polarization Shift Keying in Underwater Optical Wireless Communication under Turbulence

Abstract

The turbulence is an intractable issue for underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC), and most literature has been mainly focused on the modeling of turbulence channel and the performance analysis rather than mitigation of turbulence effect, especially from the experimental aspects. In this paper, a binary polarization shift keying (BPolSK) modulation based UOWC system is designed and built upon a $1\ m\times 1\ m$ water tank, and the performance is experimentally investigated under different turbulence strength and various transmitted optical power. The test results show the feasibility of BPolSK in alleviating the effect of temperature gradient induced underwater turbulence, and the bit error rate performance outperforms traditional on-off keying modulation with optimal decision threshold.