Integrated Optical Wireless Positioning and Communication across Air-Water Interface

Cross air-water interface communication and positioning are crucial technologies for the next generation Air-Space-Ground-Sea integrated networks. Existing designs frequently employ a floating node transmits signals and locates users in the air and underwater using radio frequency and acoustic wave, respectively, which suffer complicated system architectures and poor transmission and positioning performance. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated positioning and communication system that uses optical waves to cross the interface, exploiting the advantages of high capacity communication and precise positioning. The proposed system can simultaneously provide positioning and communication services to underwater users with the aid of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). LED Lambertian light sources are employed for underwater user communication and location. We also propose a cross-interface orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based communication method and a cross-interface particle filter (PF) based positioning method for the proposed system. Numerical results show that the proposed system can achieve reliable communication with a bit error ratio (BER) less than 10(-6) and high accuracy positioning with an average positioning mean square error (MSE) of 0.13 m for users in a circular area with a diameter of 8 meters and a water depth of 3 meters.