Abstract
As offshore industries and the Internet of underwater things (IoUT)
continue to expand, air-to-water communication is needed to connect
various underwater sensors and things to the outside world. Visible
light communication (VLC) has the potential to provide higher data rates
and longer transmission distances than radio frequency and other
air-to-water communication techniques. This paper presents an
air-to-water VLC system where a light emitting diode (LED) transmitter
carried by a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) transmits data to an
underwater receiver. We minimize the UAV energy consumption that
includes both LED transmission and UAV propulsion energy consumption by
optimizing the LED transmit power while guaranteeing that the average
received signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) at the underwater receiver is above
the required SNR. Simulation results show that our optimized LED
transmit power reduces the total UAV energy consumption by up to 46% as
compared to the benchmark schemes without increasing the transmission
time for a given data volume.