Performance evaluation of perfect optical vortices transmission in an underwater optical communication system

In this paper, we experimentally evaluated the performance of underwater optical communications using 1 Mbit/s on-off keying signals of perfect optical vortices. Perfect optical vortices generated by Fourier transformation of the Bessel-Gaussian beam are propagated through a 2.6 m underwater medium and affected by various water conditions such as stagnant water, water flow, temperature difference, and air bubbles, so beam wander and fluctuation of the signal are studied. Air bubbles have the maximum effect on signal fluctuations and beam wanders. Measurement of the system bit error rate (BER) based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for these situations matches the results of wandering and fluctuations. The system BER is studied for different values of SNR, and its value is more degraded due to the air bubbles.