Monte-Carlo-Based Impulse Response Modeling for Underwater Wireless Optical Communication

In underwater wireless optical communication links, the suspended particles in the water can lead to multiple path transmission of the light, causing the temporal dispersion and attenuation of beam pulse. The scattering phase function is a key parameter to model angle scattering in the Monte Carlo simulation and can be approximated by the commonly used Henyey-Greenstein (HG) phase function, but in turbid sea water environment, the HG phase function cannot match well with the measured value of the particle phase function. In this work, instead of using the HG phase function, we make use of the Petzold’s measured data value of the scattering phase function in turbid sea water. We propose a numerical solution for the computing of the scattering angle based on the measured particle phase function and present the difference of effect on temporal dispersion between the measurement and HG phase function. Numerical results show that our model is more accurate than the widely used HG model. An analytic double Gamma function is used to fit the Monte Carlo simulation results, and a good fit is found between the double Gamma function and the Monte Carlo simulations.