On the UOWC Performance Under Location Uncertainty

More often than not, currents due to gravity, wind friction, and heterogeneous water density cause frequent drifts of the end-users to random locations creating transmission problems in an underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) network. The location uncertainty effect on the overall network performance in harsh environments, including submarine ones, is an appealing issue that needs to be adequately addressed in the existing technical literature. The present work takes account of a vertical UOWC link where a fixed transmitter at the sea surface illuminates towards the seabed following a Lambertian pattern. In this way, a randomly placed receiver inside a spherical cone is served, and the problem is treated with three-dimensional stochastic geometry methods. In the sequel, the complete statistical behavior of the random distributions of the channel gain and the instantaneous electrical signal-to-noise ratio is estimated. Moreover, some critical network performance metrics, including the outage probability and the bit-error rate for intensity modulation/direct detection with on-off keying and M-ary pulse position modulation, are derived, whereas indicative numerical results are illustrated adequately through a series of appropriate figures.