Recent Trends in Underwater Visible Light Communication (UVLC) Systems

Abstract

In recent years, underwater visible light communication (UVLC) has become a potential wireless carrier candidate for signal transmission in highly critical, unknown, and acrimonious water mediums such as oceans. Unfortunately, the oceans are the least explored reservoirs in oceanogeographical history. However, natural disasters have aroused significant interest in observing and monitoring oceanic environments for the last couple of decades. Therefore, UVLC has drawn attention as a reliable digital carrier and claims a futuristic optical media in the wireless communication domain. Counterparts of traditional communications, the green, clean, and safe UVLC support high capacity data-rate and bandwidth with minimal delay. Nevertheless, the deployment of UVLC is challenging rather than terrestrial basis communication over long ranges. In addition, UVLC systems have severe signal attenuation and strong turbulence channel conditions. Due to the fact that, this study provides an exhaustive and comprehensive survey of recent advancements in UVLC implementations to cope with the optical signal propagation issues. In this regard, a wide detailed summary and future perspectives of underwater optical signaling towards 5G and beyond (5GB) networks along with the current project schemes, channel impairments, various optical signal modulation techniques, underwater sensor network (UWSN) architectures with energy harvesting approaches, hybrid communication possibilities, and advancements of Internet of underwater things (IoUTs) are concluded in this research.

Keywords

• Internet of underwater things (IoUTs)
• underwater wireless acoustic communication (UWAC)
• underwater wireless electromagnetic (RF) communication (UWRF)
• underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC)
• underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN)
• underwater visible light communication (UVLC)