Spatial channel model for underwater wireless optical communication links

In order to evaluate the performance of underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems, it is of significance to fully understand the impact of spatial diffusion of light beams. Meanwhile, simple and highly adaptable spatial channel modeling is also necessary and essential for performance evaluation and system design. In this paper, we focus on the spatial channel modeling and, in particular, quantify the photon spatial distributions for different water types, link distances, and transmitter/receiver characteristics. Via using the Gaussian distribution to complete the fitting, we have proposed a simple expression to describe the spatial irradiance distribution. The numerical results have shown that the proposed spatial channel model for UWOC systems agrees well with the Monte Carlo simulation results in terms of mean square error (MSE) with or below the order of 10(-7) in both turbid coastal and harbor water and demonstrates a high adaptability to the link conditions. Furthermore, on this basis, we extend the study from single source to multi-source scenario and derive the corresponding expression of spatial channel model. Considering the integrity of closely spaced multi-source array, the multi-source model has been further simplified by two-dimensional Gaussian fitting.