Outage analysis of relay-assisted underwater wireless optical communication systems

In this paper, we theoretically evaluate the outage probabilities of underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems. Our derivations are general as the channel model under consideration takes into account all of the channel degrading effects, namely absorption, scattering, and turbulence-induced fading. We numerically show that the UWOC systems, due to the severe channel impairments, cannot typically support longer link ranges than 100 m. Therefore, in this paper, in order to increase the transmission reliability and hence extend the viable communication range of UWOC systems, we apply decode-and-forward (DF) relay-assisted communications either in the form of multi-hop transmission, where multiple intermediate relays are serially employed between the source and destination, or parallel relaying in which multiple DF relays are distributed among the source-to-destination path to cooperate in the end-to-end transmission. Our numerical results reveal that multi-hop transmission, owing to the distance-dependency of all of the channel degrading effects, can tremendously improve the end-to-end outage probability and increase the accessible link ranges to hundreds of meter. For example, a dual-hop transmission in a 45 m coastal water link can provide up to 41 dB performance improvement at the outage probability of 10−9.