Average capacity analysis of underwater optical wireless communication links over anisotropic strong oceanic turbulence channels

The effect of anisotropy on the channel capacity of underwater optical wireless communication (OWC) links operating in strong oceanic turbulence is investigated. We consider a Gaussian beam wave propagating through a turbulent oceanic fading channel whose statistical distribution is modelled by a gamma-gamma function. To numerically calculate the channel capacity of the OWC system, related entities of the propagating beam such as coherence length, received signal intensity, and the scintillation index are formulated. Further, in this way, the received signal-to-noise ratio and fading distribution of the channel are obtained. The channel capacity examinations analyzed in this paper depend on the oceanic turbulence parameters, especially for the anisotropic factor of oceanic turbulence, and also depend on the other system parameters such as wavelength, link distance, noise variance, and the quantum efficiency of the photodetector. (c) 2019 Optical Society of America