An Optical Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Underwater Wireless Communication System

Optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (OIRS) have the potential to enhance the capacity of the next generation optical wireless communication systems by re-configuring the propagation environment of optical waves. In this work, a submerged OIRS and a planar mirror surface (PMS) are used to build up a non-line of sight (NLOS) underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system. An NLOS UWOC setup, which makes use of the total internal reflection (TIR) phenomenon, serves as a benchmark against which the OIRS/PMS-assisted UWOC systems are compared. With the help of the Mellin inverse transform, Meijer’s G function, and Fox’s H-function, the closed-form expressions for the probability density function (PDF), cumulative distribution function (CDF), average spectral efficiency (SE), average energy efficiency (EE), outage probability, and average bit error rate (BER) of the proposed systems are derived. Further, an asymptotic analysis of average SE is performed to illustrate a better understanding of these proposed system’s performance at high SNR. The simulation results indicate that the OIRS-assisted UWOC system shows improved performance in comparison to benchmark scenario. Additionally, the efficient zones of OIRS deployment are analyzed.