Demonstration of a 2 × 2 MIMO-UWOC system with large spot against air bubbles

In order to reduce turbulence-induced scintillation and deal with alignment problems, a 2×2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. With help of the large divergence angle of light beams and large field of view (FOV) of the detectors, the effect of high-density air bubbles is greatly eliminated. Simulation and experimental results confirm that, in most intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) MIMO-UWOC systems, the repetition coding (RC) scheme performs better than the space-time block coding (STBC) scheme. In a 50 m swimming pool, the maximum horizontal offset can reach 97.9 cm, which is 421% and 192% higher than that of STBC multiple-input single-output (MISO) and RC-MISO/STBC-MIMO schemes, respectively. With a data rate of 233 Mbps and a transmission distance of 50 m, the large detection range can meet a variety of underwater wireless communication requirements. The experiment indicates that, when the difference in the transmission distance between the two optical signals is higher than 1 m, the bit error rate (BER) of the RC scheme increases sharply, while the BER of the STBC scheme is stable. The MIMO coding scheme needs to be selected according to the actual application environment.