Underwater optical communication performance for laser beam propagation through weak oceanic turbulence

In clean ocean water, the performance of a underwater optical communication system is limited mainly by oceanic turbulence, which is defined as the fluctuations in the index of refraction resulting from temperature and salinity fluctuations. In this paper, using the refractive index spectrum of oceanic turbulence under weak turbulence conditions, we carry out, for a horizontally propagating plane wave and spherical wave, analysis of the aperture-averaged scintillation index, the associated probability of fade, mean signal-to-noise ratio, and mean bit error rate. Our theoretical results show that for various values of the rate of dissipation of mean squared temperature and the temperature-salinity balance parameter, the large-aperture receiver leads to a remarkable decrease of scintillation and consequently a significant improvement on the system performance. Such an effect is more noticeable in the plane wave case than in the spherical wave case. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America