Multiuser Data Transmission Aided by Simultaneous Transmit and Reflect Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface in Underwater Wireless Optical Communications

Recent research in the wireless communications field has focused on the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which can enhance energy and spectrum efficiency by reconfiguring radio waves to propagate in a specific direction. In this study, we applied the simultaneous transmit and reflect (STAR)-RIS to an underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system. In contrast to a conventional RIS, a STAR-RIS allows multiple users to transfer data simultaneously in all directions by obtaining a UWOC channel despite underwater turbulence, beam attenuation, blockage, and pointing errors. Underwater turbulence-induced fading was obtained by using exponential and generalized Gamma distributions, and numerical analysis were performed to evaluate the outage probability, bit error rate (BER), and channel capacity of a direct UWOC channel, conventional RIS assisted UWOC channel, and STAR-RIS assisted UWOC channel. The BER performance was also evaluated according to the number of reflective elements, type of modulation scheme, impact of pointing errors, blockage levels, and varying the transmit-reflection coefficient. Monte-Carlo simulations were performed to validate the analytical results for the BER and outage probability with respect to the average signal-to-noise ratio. Experiments were performed to demonstrate the received luminous intensity performance with respect to the incident beam luminous intensity of the proposed STAR-RIS assisted UWOC channel.