Agile Underwater Optical Wireless Communication Enabled by Integrated Blue-Green Optical Phased Array Beam Steering

Abstract

Underwater optical wireless communication (UWOC) offers high data rate and low-latency links for short- and medium-range maritime networks, but practical deployment is constrained by pointing, acquisition, and tracking; water-dependent absorption and scattering; mobility of autonomous underwater vehicles; and the difficulty of maintaining narrow optical beams with mechanically steered optics. This paper proposes an integrated optical phased array (OPA) based UWOC architecture in which a chip-scale OPA provides electronically fast-steerable beams in the blue-green optical window. The core idea is to replace wide beams or fixed collimators or mechanical gimbals with a programmable optical antenna capable of rapid beam sweeping, closed-loop tracking, adaptive beamwidth control, angular filtering at the receiver, and multi-node spatial scheduling. The proposed concept is positioned as an enabling technology for agile UWOC links among AUVs, sensor nodes, docking stations, and hybrid acoustic-optical underwater networks.