Experimental Evaluation of OFDM-Based Underwater Visible Light Communication System

High-speed, reliable, flexible, and cost-effective underwater wireless communication systems have a wide variety of use in scientific, civilian, and commercial domains. Visible light communication (VLC) seems to be a promising candidate in satisfying majority of the requirements listed above. From this perspective, VLC could easily be deployed in heterogeneous wireless networking scenarios with high quality of service. Therefore, in this paper, an adapted LTE frame structure is implemented for underwater VLC (UVLC) system. The performance of UVLC system employing asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modulation technique is practically tested by taking channel estimation and synchronization into account. Also, the effects of varying orthogonal frequency division multiplexing parameters on the system's signal-to-noise ratio and the bit-error-rate (BER) performances are studied. The implementation is tested for quadrature phase shift keying and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation techniques supporting both 128- and 1024-points fast Fourier transform configurations, which correspond to data rates of 1.92 and 15.36  Mbps, respectively. Experimental results show that BER could be reduced down to a level on the order of 10⁻⁶.