Comprehensive experimental and statistical analysis of the effects of salinity gradient, temperature gradient, air bubbles on the performance of underwater wireless optical communication link

Salinity gradients (SGs), temperature gradients (TGs), and different-sized air bubbles affect the optical signal propagating in the UWOC link. These effects contribute to beam wandering, spot dancing, and intensity fluctuations in the received optical signal. In this paper, experimental analysis has been carried out to estimate the effect of SG, TG and air bubbles on the underwater optical signal. The beam wandering, mean and variance deviation, displacement of weighted centroid, the statistical distribution of received intensities and link outage probability have been estimated in this work. It has been found that the beam wandering effects follow a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). It is also observed that in the presence of air bubbles in the SG, the chances of link outage increase from 48% to 80% and it increases from 7% to 28% in the TG conditions. Furthermore, the experimental and theoretical modelled outage probabilities are in close agreement.