On the Performance of DF Based Dual-Hop Mixed RF/UWOC System

This paper investigates the performance of the decode-and-forward (DF) based dual-hop mixed radio frequency/underwater wireless optical communication (RF/UWOC) system. For high bandwidth requirement in various underwater activities like surveillance, explorations and climate monitoring, UWOC has recently been considered as a viable solution for high speed information transfer. The proposed mixed RF/UWOC system helps in establishing the connectivity between terrestrial and underwater regions. The RF link is modeled by Nakagami-m fading and the UWOC link is modeled by Exponential-Generalized Gamma (EGG) distributed turbulence induced by air bubbles, temperature variations and salinity of the water. For this mixed dual-hop communication system, novel analytical expressions are derived for the average bit error rate for various binary modulation techniques in terms of Meijer-G function. Simulation and analytical results both match perfectly and show that the performance of the considered system is degraded much severely by the turbulence caused by the air bubbles and the temperature variations than by the salinity of the water.