Joint Relay Selection and Power Allocation for Underwater Cooperative Optical Wireless Networks

Cooperative transmission is a promising technology to expand communication range and improve system performance for underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs). To adequately exploit the benefits of cooperative UOWCs, the relay selection and power allocation problems require to be explored. This paper investigates the relay selection and power allocation issues for the cooperative UOWC in the presence of solar radiation noise. Specifically, the cooperative UOWC based on amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying is modeled, where the effects of absorption, scattering, and solar radiation noise are all considered. We design two optimization schemes that minimize the energy consumption and maximize the overall signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), respectively. Both schemes are proved to be strictly quasi-convex and solved by Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is evaluated in line-of-sight (LOS) links and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links, and the main factor affecting the relay selection and power allocation are derived for both LOS links and NLOS links.