Abstract:
This letter proposes a combined underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) system consisting of maximum ratio combining (MRC)-based direct link and optical intelligent reflecting surface (OIRS)-assisted indirect link. Oceanic turbulence is modeled by the mixture exponential–generalized gamma (EGG) distribution. We evaluate the system performance using the outage probability. An exact outage probability expression is derived for these links under EGG oceanic turbulence and pointing errors (PEs). Moreover, we derive the asymptotic expression for the outage probability to present an analytical expression of the system’s diversity order. We demonstrate that the Monte Carlo simulation results perfectly match the derived expressions, and closely align with the asymptotic expression at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. Hence, the proposed system ameliorates the connectivity of the high-speed UOWC under different underwater channel conditions.