Experimental Demonstration and Simulation of Bandwidth-Limited Underwater Wireless Optical Communication with MLSE

Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) is able to provide large bandwidth, low latency, and high security. However, there still exist bandwidth limitations in UWOC systems, with a lack of effective compensation methods. In this paper, we systematically study the bandwidth limitation due to the transceiver and underwater channel through experiments and simulations, respectively. Experimental results show that by using the 7-tap maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) detection, the maximum bitrate of the simple rectangular shape on-off-keying (OOK) signaling is increased from 2.4 Gb/s to 4 Gb/s over 1 GHz transceiver bandwidth, compared to the conventional symbol-by-symbol detection. For the bandwidth limitation caused by the underwater channel, we simulate the temporal dispersion in the UWOC by adopting a Monte Carlo method with a Fournier-Forand phase function. With MLSE adopted at the receiver, the maximum available bitrate is improved from 0.4 to 0.8 Gb/s in 12 m of harbor water at the threshold of hard-decision forward-error-correction (HD-FEC, 3.8 x 10(-3)). Moreover, when the bitrate for 0.4 Gb/s 12 m and 0.8 Gb/s 10 m OOK transmission remains unchanged, the power budget can be reduced from 33.8 dBm to 30 dBm and from 27.8 dBm to 23.6 dBm, respectively. The results of both experiments and simulations indicate that MLSE has great potential for improving the performance of bandwidth-limited communication systems.