This paper proposes a multiple-lens receiver scheme to increase the misalignment tolerance of an underwater optical wireless communications link between an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and a sensor plane. An accurate model of photon propagation based on the Monte Carlo simulation is presented which accounts for the lens(es) photon refraction at the sensor interface and angular misalignment between the emitter and receiver. The results show that the ideal divergence of the beam of the emitter is around 15° for a 1 m transmission length, increasing to 22° for a shorter distance of 0.5 m but being independent of the water turbidity. In addition, it is concluded that a seven-lense scheme is approximately three times more tolerant to offset than a single lens. A random forest machine learning algorithm is also assessed for its suitability to estimate the offset and angle of the AUV in relation to the fixed sensor, based on the power distribution of each lens, in real time. The algorithm is able to estimate the offset and angular misalignment with a mean square error of 5 mm (6 mm) and 0.157 rad (0.174 rad) for a distance between the transmitter and receiver of 1 m and 0.5 m, respectively.

An OFDM transmission system is reported based on a directly modulated blue LASER diode, for high bit rate under-water optical communication applications. The 256 subcarriers 16-QAM signal is transmitted over a total distance of 2.4 m underwater with an EVM lower than -28.5 dB for a 250 MHz bandwidth and -16.5 dB for a 2 GHz bandwidth, the BER being lower than the forward error corrector limit. At the maximum bandwidth of 2 GHz a transmission rate of 5.36 Gbit/s is achieved.

In this paper, we present the design of an analog transmitter based on a blue LD targeting optical wireless communications, suitable for OFDM signals. The approach relies on a thorough characterization of the individual components of the module, whence a detailed circuit model is obtained to design an impedance matching circuit for improved performance, prior to fabrication. The impedance matching is based on non-uniform transmission lines and works well over a wide frequency range (100 MHz to 2 GHz). The results are experimentally validated by the transmitter response exhibiting an increased 6 dB bandwidth limit and 1 GHz bandwidth improvement.