Demonstration of a multi-hop underwater visible light communication system

This paper demonstrates a multi-hop underwater visible light communication (VLC) system using light emitting diodes (LEDs). It is demonstrated that using a multi-hop technique, the overall underwater VLC distance can be increased significantly without adding significant complexity to the physical layer. The performance of the multi-hop system is compared to a single-hop technique utilizing three types of water in the laboratory environment, namely sea, canal, and tap water. The obtained results validate that a multi-hop technique can be a viable solution to overcome the problem of limited underwater communication range.