High-speed underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) was achieved using an 80 μm blue-emitting GaN-based micro-LED. The micro-LED has a peak emission wavelength of ~440 nm and an underwater power attenuation of 1 dB/m in tap water. The -3 dB electrical-to-optical modulation bandwidth of the packaged micro-LED increases with increasing current and saturates at ~160 MHz. At an underwater distance of 0.6 m, 800 Mb/s data rate was achieved with a bit error rate (BER) of 1.3 × 10^-3, below the forward error correction (FEC) criteria. And we obtained 100 Mb/s data communication speed with a received light output power of -40 dBm and a BER of 1.9 × 10^-3, suggesting that UOWC with extended distance can be achieved. Through reflecting the light emission beam by mirrors within a water tank, we experimentally demonstrated a 200 Mb/s data rate with a BER of 3.0 × 10^-6 at an underwater distance of 5.4 m.

To enable high-speed long-distance underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) supplementing traditional underwater wireless communication, a low-power 520 nm green laser diode (LD) based UOWC system was proposed and experimentally demonstrated to implement maximal communication capacity of up to 2.70 Gbps data rate over a 34.5 m underwater transmission distance by using non-return-to-zero on-off keying (NRZ-OOK) modulation scheme. Moreover, maximum data rates of up to 4.60 Gbps, 4.20 Gbps, 3.93 Gbps, 3.88 Gbps, and 3.48 Gbps at underwater distances of 2.3 m, 6.9 m, 11.5 m, 16.1 m and 20.7 m were achieved, respectively. The light attenuation coefficient of ~0.44 dB/m was obtained and the beam divergence angle is 0.35°, so the aallowable underwater transmission distance can be estimated to be ~90.7 m at a data rate of 0.15 Gbps with a corresponding received light-output power of -33.01 dBm and a bit-error rate (BER) of 2.0 ×10. In addition, when the data rate is up to 1 Gbps, the UOWC distance is predicted to be ~62.7 m for our proposed UOWC system. The achievements we make are suitable for applications requiring high-speed long-distance real-time UOWC.

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White light generated by mixing the red, green, and blue laser diodes (RGB LDs) for simultaneous high-speed underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) and high-efficiency underwater solid-state lighting (SSL) was proposed and demonstrated experimentally for the first time. The allowable maximum real-time data transmission rates of 3.2 Gbps, 3.4 Gbps, and 3.1 Gbps for RGB LDs with corresponding BERs of 3.6 × 10, 3.5 × 10 and 3.7 × 10 were obtained at a 2.3 m underwater transmission distance using an on-off keying (OOK) modulation scheme, respectively. And the corresponding UWOC aggregate data rate of 9.7 Gbps was achieved based on RGB LDs-based wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) UWOC. Moreover, UWOC and underwater SSL by using RGB LDs mixed white light were investigated at different scenarios over an underwater link of 2.3 m. The RGB LDs mixed white light-based UWOC system without optical diffusers yielded a maximum allowable data rate of 8.7 Gbps with Commission International de l'Eclairage coordinates (CIE) of (0.3154, 0.3354), a correlated color temperature of 6322 K, a color rendering index of 69.3 and a corresponding illuminance of 7084 lux. Furthermore, optical diffusers were employed to provide large-area underwater SSL. The LDs mixed white light-based UWOC system with line and circle optical diffusers implemented data rates of 5.9 Gbps and 6.6 Gbps with CIE coordinates of (0.3183, 0.3269) and (0.3298, 0.3390), respectively. This work suggests the potential of LDs for applications in high-efficiency underwater white-light SSL and high-speed UWOC.