An Adaptive DPPM for Efficient and Robust Visible Light Communication Across the Air-Water Interface

The scarcity of the optical power is the main challenge for underwater visible light communication. It becomes worst for communication across the air-water interface because of the reflection of light from the air-water interface. Differential pulse position modulation (DPPM) is one of the power efficient modulation techniques. In L-DPPM a block of M = log(2)L input data is mapped into one of the L distinct waveforms containing only one on chip. The size of the DPPM packet is variable and depends on the value of input data and L, which makes error detection quite challenging. In this paper, we propose a frame structure that efficiently enables error detection within a packet for various symbol length, L, of DPPM. We also propose an algorithm using such a frame structure to enable effective detection of packet errors and for adaptively changing the value of L for optimal power efficiency while meeting a certain bound on the packet error rate (PER). We have named our proposed protocol as adaptive differential pulse position modulation (ADPPM). The Bit rate and PER have been studied for different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) through simulation. A comparison between ADPPM and OOK, DPPM with fixed L is provided.