On stochastic model for underwater wireless optical links

Light beam suffers attenuation due to absorbtion and multiple scattering when propagating through underwater environment especially in turbid water. The spatial and temporal distribution of photons after propagation can quantify this channel attenuation and therefore is a key issue for underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC). Typically, the spatial distribution of photons consists two key factors which are the moving distance and scattering angle for each photon before and after interacting with a particle, respectively. In this paper, we present a stochastic model for UWOC links by adopting the Henyey-Greenstein (HG) function as probability density function (PDF) of scattering angle and deriving the PDF of step distance for each photon. The proposed stochastic model can be used to evaluate the spatial and temporal distribution of photons, which fits well with Monte Carlo simulation result in turbid seawater such as coastal water.