Negatively Biased Solar Cell Optical Receiver for Underwater Wireless Optical Communication System With Low Peak Average Power Ratio

Abstract

Charging batteries in underwater scenarios is generally very expensive and impractical, and solar cell (SC)-based underwater simultaneous lightwave information and power transfer (SLIPT) systems are a powerful solution. However, silicon SC receiver devices have limited bandwidth and are prone to deep signal-to-noise (SNR) degradation during underwater light fading effects. For these problems, this manuscript proposes a negative-biased SC optical receiver scheme to increase the $-3$ dB bandwidth of silicon SC from 440 kHz to 780 kHz. For the deep fading of SNR caused by various degradation effects in the water environment, a low peak average power ratio (PAPR) discrete Fourier transform spread orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DFT-S-OFDM) modulation scheme is employed to counteract the deep fading phenomenon in the system. Achieved a communication rate of 15.2 Mbps in a 60 cm underwater environment with a fading factor of 0.403 and a bit error rate (BER) of $1.59\times 10^{-3}$ under perturbation. Also, the performance of DFT-S-OFDM and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation systems in water environments with different turbidity (absorption characteristics and scattering) and presence of disturbances are compared separately, and the DFT-S-OFDM system is more robust. Finally, we complete the energy harvesting during the communication process, and the experiments show that the total battery power efficiency of the energy harvesting system can be increased by 1.87 times under the white light-emitting diode (LED) continuous irradiation for three hours.

Keywords

• Underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC)
• SLIPT
• negative bias solar cell
• DFT-S-OFDM