Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is a promising technology to improve spectrum utilization effectively for underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC). To exploit the benefits of NOMA in a turbulent environment, cooperative transmission has been introduced in the NOMA–UOWC network. The existing studies on NOMA suggest that relay selection and power optimization are the main factors affecting system performance. In this paper, a general NOMA node pairing method and two power optimization schemes for NOMA–UOWC are proposed, and both schemes are proven to be strictly quasi-convex. The two optimization schemes are solved by the BFGS algorithm and the particle swarm algorithm, respectively. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes are evaluated by our simulations, and the main factors affecting the relay-aided NOMA performance are derived.

Both the long-term beam spreading caused by ocean turbulence and the pointing errors induced by the jitter of transmitters and receivers degrade the performance of underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) links. To effectively alleviate their effects, an in-depth study was carried out over the Málaga turbulence channel with pointing errors and beam spreading in multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) UWOC. First, we analyzed the long-term beam spreading and the received light power for the finite receiving aperture in the presence of pointing error displacements. Based on this, the relationship between beam spreading, pointing errors, and signal power was established. Second, the approximate expressions of the average bit error rate (BER) and the communication outage probability were derived theoretically for this MIMO system using maximal-ratio combining (MRC) diversity. Third, the effects of the pointing errors on the coding and the diversity gains were explored for the MIMO links. Finally, using the observed ocean data from the Global Ocean Argo gridded dataset, we numerically verified the combined effects of ocean turbulence strength, beam spreading, and pointing errors on the average BER and outage probability of this system. These results also proved that adjusting the size of the receiving aperture or the order of the multiple quadrature amplitude modulation (mQAM) could effectively mitigate their effects.