AI-Enabled Hybrid Optical–Acoustic Communication for UUVs Using WDM-OOK: Design and Real-Time Performance Evaluation

Authors

  • Sameer Sami Hassan Department of Computer Science, College of Education for pure science/Ibn Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
  • Yusor Rafid Bahar Al-Mayouf Department of Computer Science, College of Education for pure science/Ibn Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
  • Omar Adil Mahdi Department of Computer Science, College of Education for pure science/Ibn Al-Haitham, University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq
  • Marcel Ambroze Department of Electronic and Communication Engineering, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59746/6f7z3s95

Keywords:

Underwater communication, Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, Wavelength Division Multiplexing On–Off Keying, Hybrid optical acoustic communication, Adaptive systems, Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

One of the key challenges is reliable communication for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) since underwater environments are dynamic and challenging for signal transmission. The traditional acoustic communication systems allow long-distance communication but are limited by the low bandwidth, high latency, and doppler effect. Optical wireless, on the other hand, provides high data rates with water absorption and scattering occurring within the transmission distance, but has a short range of communication. To overcome these drawbacks, a smart hybrid optical-acoustic communication system is proposed that is a combination of Wavelength Division Multiplexing and On-Off Keying (WDM-OOK) to transmit a high-speed signal over optical and acoustic channels to achieve high reliability of long-range communication. The design of an intelligent hybrid optical–acoustic communications network to improve the continuity, reliability, and throughput of the communication between a UUV system is the focus of this research. It is a combination of a simple model of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), a real-time communication mode switch, an optical subsystem (Wavelength Division Multiplexing On–Off Keying (WDM-OOK)), and an acoustic communication subsystem. The system has been modelled and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink and synthesized in HDL Coder as it will be implemented on an FPGA (Kintex-7 325T). The results of the simulations validate the superiority of the proposed hybrid method (hybrid with AI) over the purely optical method, the purely acoustic method, and the hybrid method without AI. The minimum BER recorded on this platform was (10-7), the average throughput was 152 Mbps, and the end-to-end latency time was 12.7ms with good water clarity. The FPGA synthesis results also show that the model was appropriate for real-time implementation with only 18.1% of the LUTs, 10.5% of the flip-flops, 23.6% of the BRAMs, and 17.4% of the DSPs utilized for the Kintex-7 325T FPGA. The results verified the feasibility of the proposed hybrid optical–acoustic communication system, where the high-speed feature of using the optical communication WDM-OOK system and the robustness of the acoustic communication system are provided by the intelligent adaptive switching. The proposed framework is feasible and is scalable for underwater reliable real-time communication between unmanned optical vehicles (UOVs) in underwater unmanned vehicle networks (UUVnets) in the near future.

References

[1] M. M. Sagar, Menaka Konara, N. Picard, and K. Park, “State-of-the-Art Navigation Systems and Sensors for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs),” Applied Mechanics, vol. 6, no. 10, p. 55, Feb. 2025.

[2] T. Ma, S. Zeng and Y. Zhou, "Communication and Networking Technologies for Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Swarms: A Survey," in IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, vol. 7, pp. 734-747, 2026, doi:10.1109/OJCOMS.2025.3643165.

[3] ‌Y. Ao, S. Li, and H. Duan, “Artificial Intelligence-Aided Design (AIAD) for Structures and Engineering: A State-of-the-Art Review and Future Perspectives,” Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, Mar. 2025.

[4] Y. Liu, F. Zhou and T. Shang, "A Novel Initialization Method for Hybrid Underwater Optical Acoustic Networks," in IEEE Network, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 277-284, May 2025, doi: 10.1109/MNET.2025.3545347.

[5] ‌W. Liu and M. Gai, “PV-MLP: A lightweight patch-based multi-layer perceptron network with time–frequency domain fusion for accurate long-sequence photovoltaic power forecasting,” Renewable Energy, vol. 251, p. 123277, Oct. 2025.

[6] N. A. Hamdullah and M. Çevik, "A Review on Underwater Optical Wireless Communication (UOWC) Technology: Current Trends and Future Prospects," 2025 7th International Congress on Human-Computer Interaction, Optimization and Robotic Applications (ICHORA), Ankara, Turkiye, 2025, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/ICHORA65333.2025.11017044.

[7] W. Jiang, C. Pan, F. Tong, Z. Z hu and L. Xu, "Exploiting Time-Varying Sparsity for Underwater Acoustic Communication Under Delay and Doppler Spreading Channel," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 12, no. 22, pp. 48451-48462, 15 Nov.15, 2025, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2025.3605742.

[8] ‌ Y. Lian, J. Wang, Z. Li, W. Liu, L. Huang, and X. Jiang, ‘Residual attention-guided vision transformer with acoustic-vibration signal feature fusion for cross-domain fault diagnosis’, Advanced Engineering Informatics, vol. 64, p. 103003, 2025, doi: 10.1016/j.aei.2024.103003.

[9] H. H. Abdullah and G. A. Al-Dainy, ‘Impact of water turbidity on the transmitted laser based on optical wireless communication system’, in AIP Conference Proceedings, 2026, vol. 3460, p. 030018, doi.org/10.1063/5.0328189.

[10] C. Min-seok, ‘Reconfigurable ASIC-FPGA Hybrid Architecture for Energy-Efficient Embedded Signal Processing Applications’, Journal of VLSI and Embedded System Design, pp. 45–56, 2026.

[11] S. Sami Hassan Al-Obaidi, “Blue Laser Optical NOMA Communication Applied on Control Drone-to-Underwater Vehicle ”, IJSER, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 89–98, Mar.2025.

[12] H. Hui, X. Hao, F. Bai, Y. Chen, and Y. Hu, ‘Implementation of an acoustic-logging-data compression algorithm on DSP and FPGA platforms’, Review of Scientific Instruments, vol. 96, no. 9, 2025.

[13] J. Simon, N. Kapileswar and A. Mohanakumar, "A Novel Energy Adaptive Neural Network and Deep Q-Learning Network for Improved Energy Efficiency in Dynamic Underwater IoT Environment," in IEEE Access, vol. 13, pp. 141403-141419, 2025, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3597025.

[14] P. V. Rao, P. Kumar, and P. Kumar, ‘Underwater Acoustic Communication Modems: Recent Trends in Technology’, Indian Journal of Pure & Applied Physics (IJPAP), vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 319–338, 2025.

[15] V. L. Jayaweera, C. Peiris, D. Darshani, S. Edirisinghe, N. Dharmaweera, and U. Wijewardhana, ‘Visible light communication for underwater applications: Principles, challenges, and future prospects’, in Photonics, 2025, vol. 12, p. 593.

[16] P. S, N. S, V. V, R. K. K, R. G and K. L, "Noise Reduction in Underwater Acoustic Signals Using a Hybrid Wavelet Transform and Graph Neural Network (GNN) Model," 2025 2nd Asia Pacific Conference on Innovation in Technology (APCIT), MYSORE, India, 2025, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/APCIT65661.2025.11410702.

[17] Y. Guo and L. Xu, ‘Path loss characteristics of green light non-line-of-sight communication in turbid seawater’, Applied Optics, vol. 65, no. 10, pp. 3338–3349, 2026.

[18] S. Hassan, Y. Al-Mayouf, O. Mahdi, W. Abd Shukur, and M. Ambroze, “Blue Laser Underwater Optical Visible Light Communication Using Recursive OFDM”, WJES, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–13, Mar. 2025, doi: 10.31185/wjes.Vol13.Iss1.607.

[19] N. A. Hamdullah and M. Çevik, "A Review on Underwater Optical Wireless Communication (UOWC) Technology: Current Trends and Future Prospects," 2025 7th International Congress on Human-Computer Interaction, Optimization and Robotic Applications (ICHORA), Ankara, Turkiye, 2025, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/ICHORA65333.2025.11017044.

[20] B. A. Ribeiro, F. C. Xavier, V. R. Barroso, V. F. da Silva, T. A. Netto, and C. Ferraz, ‘Study and Feasibility of Underwater Acoustic Data Transmission’, Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, vol. 14, no. 7, p. 648, 2026.

[21] Y. R. B. Al-Mayouf, O. Adil Mahdi, S. S. Hassan, and N. A. Taha, ‘Toward Efficient Virtual Cell-Based Topology Management and Adaptive Routing for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks’, Network, vol. 6, no. 2, 2026.

[22] K. K, K. S, M. S, M. M, S. P. V and H. M, "A Survey on Improving Power Efficiency and Data Rates in Underwater Acoustic Communication Using OFDM," 2026 International Conference on Communication, Computing and Emerging Technologies (IC3ET), Vasai, India, 2026, pp. 192-197, doi: 10.1109/IC3ET64989.2026.11467451.

[23] O. Angelsky, M. Strynadko, C. Zenkova, and J. Zheng, ‘Hybrid distributed acoustic and Fourier-transform interferometric sensing with modular fiber-optic architecture’, in Seventeenth International Conference on Correlation Optics, 2025, vol. 13813, p. 138130N.

[24] N. Kapileswar and J. Simon, "Federated Learning-Assisted Spectrum Sharing for Secure and Adaptive Underwater Cognitive Acoustic-Optical Networks," 2026 5th International Conference on Communication, Computing and Electronics Systems (ICCCES), Coimbatore, India, 2026, pp. 244-249, doi: 10.1109/ICCCES62661.2026.11437038.

[25] D. S. Chauhan, G. Kaur, and D. Kumar, ‘Dual-hop Malaga underwater wireless optical communication system with pointing errors for IoUT’, Photonic Network Communications, vol. 49, no. 1, p. 2, 2025.

[26] D. Spinosa, J. Lazzarin, F. Campagnaro and M. Zorzi, "A Practical Evaluation of Forward Error Correction Schemes and PSK Detection Parameters for Underwater Acoustic Transmissions," OCEANS 2025 Brest, BREST, France, 2025, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/OCEANS58557.2025.11104408.

Downloads

Published

2026-06-30

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2026): Journal of Al-Farabi for Engineering Sciences

Section

Articles