BER Performance Evaluation of Different Modulation Techniques for Underwater FSO Communication System

Wireless data transmission in the underwater medium is of high importance for applications related to the oil industry, military, and scientific community purposes. In the underwater environment, optical wave propagation experiences scattering effect that produces dispersion and creates inter symbol interference that minimizes the signal-to-noise ratio. This paper evaluates different modulation techniques like Phase ShiftKeying (PSK), Differential Phase ShiftKeying (DPSK), Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM), and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) for four different types of underwatermedia, viz., pure sea, clean ocean, coastal ocean, and turbid harbor water by assuming the Rayleigh fading channel model and found the best suitable technique for Underwater Free Space Optical (UW-FSO) communication.