On UWOC Uplink Transmission with Spatially Random Underwater Sensors

As a promising technology, underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) offers several advantages over traditional underwater acoustic communication, including higher bandwidth, greater security, and lower latency. Optical communication enables real-time image or video transmission, facilitating aquatic resource exploration and sensing applications. In this work, we investigate the outage performance of a UWOC transmission system consisting of multiple underwater sensors uniformly distributed in a specific water area and a relay floating on the water surface. The outage probability of the considered system is affected by various factors, including the location randomness of the sensors and the propagation loss and turbulence-induced fading. Thus, the impacts of these factors are modeled by integrating geometric probability theory in this work to establish a framework for theoretical analysis of UWOC end-to-end performance. Numerical results show that the increase in the number of underwater sensors can lower the outage probability, and turbulence-induced fading has a positive effect on outage performance compared to the scenario without fading for the considered transmit power range in this work.