A new simple model for underwater wireless optical channels in the presence of air bubbles

A novel statistical model is proposed to characterize turbulence-induced fading in underwater wireless optical channels in the presence of air bubbles for fresh and salty waters, based on experimental data. In this model, the channel irradiance fluctuations are characterized by the mixture Exponential-Gamma distribution. We use the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to obtain the maximum likelihood parameter estimation of the new model. Interestingly, the proposed model is shown to provide a perfect fit with the measured data under all the channel conditions for both types of water. The major advantage of the new model is that it has a simple mathematical form making it attractive from a performance analysis point of view. Indeed, the application of the Exponential-Gamma model leads to closed-form and analytically tractable expressions for key system performance metrics such as the outage probability and the average bit-error rate.