Abstract: As far as we know, the performance of the underwater-to-air (uplink) UWOC system has not been investigated, where the source is located some depth under the sea and the receiver is located above the surface of the sea. Our goal is to model a channel for uplink UWOC system. The channel in this communication system involves light beam propagation through the water and water-air interface. In general, the performance of uplink UWOC system will be affected by both scattering properties of sea water particulates (algae, detritus, sand minerals and bubbles) and sea surface slopes caused by winds. In this research work, the optical communication channels are characterized for the different sea surface models (Cox & Munk and 2D ECKV). The two-dimensional ECKV model represents the wave surface with a spatial correlation, while the Cox and Munk model predicts the slope distribution of the wave surface without spatial correlation information at different wind speeds. The solution technique involves in the channel mode is a Monte Carlo method. The effect of correlated and uncorrelated sea surface slopes on UWOC is studied. The reduction in the received power is analyzed when the beam propagated through the water-air interface for higher wind speeds in both the models.
Further, this research study also aims to model the UWOC uplink channel considering the bubble effect (generated on sea surface due to wave breaking). First, the optical properties of bubbles are studied and a model was developed to retrieve the distribution of bubbles using light scattering techniques.