Performance Evaluation of Underwater Optical Wireless Communication Depending on the Modulation Scheme Current Optics and Photonics

Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is a good candidate for high-speed underwater wireless communication. In this work, we compare the performance of several modulation techniques for a UOWC system consisting of a light-emitting diode (LED) with an operating wavelength of 405 nm and a Si avalanche photodiode (APD). In this work, we consider six modulation schemes: 4-quadra-ture amplitude modulation (QAM), 8-QAM, quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), binary phase shift keying (BPSK), on-off keying (OOK), and 4-pulse amplitude modulation (PAM). We also consider the cases of pure water and seawater for the working conditions. Our results show that 4-QAM and 8-QAM perform the best, in terms of communication distance and transmission power efficiency, for all water types considered.