Improved Synchronization Scheme for the Photon- Counting-Based Underwater Optical Wireless Communication System

Abstract

To address existing issues in conventional correlation method, we propose an improved synchronization method for photon-counting-based underwater optical wireless communication system employing on-off keying modulation. The proposed method jointly estimates the synchronization position, signal intensity, background intensity and data sequence based on the received vector in the period of a frame length. To reduce the complexity for solving the estimation problem, several simplifications are performed based on the characteristics of the data sequence. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an optical power gain of at least 1 dB over the correlation method at the bit error rate of 10 −3 under dynamic channel.