Abstract:
This paper investigates the inclusion of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in data acquisition in underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) systems for the internet of underwater things (IoUT). The paper proposes a medium access control layered protocol that employs slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and code-combining (C-C) to support reliable communication between multiple underwater sensors and a receiver. A buoy-mounted IRS is considered to improve signal reliability and mitigate underwater attenuation, turbulence, and beam misalignment. The underwater communication channel is modeled using the exponentiated Weibull distribution to propose a framework for the outage analysis of both uniformly and randomly distributed sensors with C-C. The throughput performance of the proposed IoUT network for S-ALOHA and C-C demonstrates that system performance is well controlled by the reflecting elements, transmission distance, and fading parameters. Simulation results claim that the IRS-assisted UOWC significantly improves throughput and reduces outage probability under challenging underwater conditions.