We consider channel characterization for underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) systems. We focus on the channel impulse response and, in particular, quantify the channel time dispersion for different water types, link distances, and transmitter/receiver characteristics, taking into account realistic parameters. We use the Monte Carlo approach to simulate the trajectories of emitted photons propagating in water from the transmitter towards the receiver. During their propagation, photons are absorbed or scattered as a result of their interaction with different particles present in water. To model angle scattering, we use the two-term Henyey-Greenstein model in our channel simulator. We show that this model is more accurate than the commonly used Henyey-Greenstein model, especially in pure sea waters. Through the numerical results that we present, we show that, except for highly turbid waters, the channel time dispersion can be neglected when working over moderate distances. In other words, under such conditions, we do not suffer from any inter-symbol interference in the received signal. Lastly, we study the performance of a typical UWOC system in terms of bit-error-rate using the simple on-off-keying modulation. The presented results give insight into the design of UWOC systems.

We investigate in this paper channel modeling for underwater optical channels. In particular, we focus on the channel impulse response and quantify the channel time dispersion under different conditions of water type, link distance, and the transmitter/receiver parameters. Our approach is based on Monte Carlo simulations where we simulate the trajectories of emitted photons propagating in water channel towards the receiver. We show that in most practical cases, the time dispersion is negligible and does not induce any inter-symbol interference on the received symbols. The realistic channel model that we present in this paper can be used to appropriately set different system design parameters.