Towards Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Underwater Optical Wireless Communications

The superiority of optical communications in underwater mediums, in terms of higher data rate and reliability, makes underwater optical wireless communications (UOWC) more favorable to provide ultra-reliable low-latency underwater communications, as compared to other wireless technologies, e.g., acoustic and radio frequency (RF) communications. UOWC limited transmission range, however, remains a major hurdle against assessing its true deployment benefits, which motivates for the necessity of developing practical routing protocols for multi-hop underwater optical wireless sensor networks (UOWSNs). This paper sheds light on the existing state-of-art UOWC routing protocols, the majority of which requires centralized implementation with large end-to-end delay. The article further proposes routing algorithms which can be implemented in a distributed fashion across the multi-hop links, with a reasonable amount of information exchange. The merits of the proposed algorithms are particularly highlighted through illustrative simulations, which show how the proposed strategies outperform the classical protocols, both in terms of reliability and end-to-end latency. Finally, the paper shows how the proposed distributive routing protocols achieve ultra-reliable low-latency underwater communications.