Integrated blue light phased arrays enabling underwater optical wireless networks: towards a new era of Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) (BlueArray)

Research Project, 2024 – 2028

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is defined as a worldwide network of smart interconnected underwater objects, poised to revolutionize a number of related technologies including ocean monitoring observatories, underwater exploration and resource exploitation, disaster prediction and prevention, aquaculture, and defense/security. The establishment of the IoUT requires sensing, localization, and data transmission functionalities, which are mostly achieved through the use of underwater wireless sensor networks, consisting of small, intelligent, and battery-powered sensors. A crucial point is to enable transmission of the collected data over relatively large distances with high speed, low power consumption and low environmental impact. Underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) represents a promising technology with the potential of addressing these requirements. However, the current UOWC technology suffers from several drawbacks, mainly related to the beam misalignment and low localization accuracy underwater, making it unviable to reach the requirements of establishing the IoUT. BlueArray will explore breakthrough technologies for the next generation of UOWC systems with the ambition of making unprecedented underwater data connectivity, with requirements in terms of range, energy efficiency, node mobility, as well as low environmental impact. To face the numerous related challenges, BlueArray will undertake a radically new approach by enabling efficient and high-speed optical beam steering, featuring low loss, narrow beam, and large field-of-view. This is accomplished through advancing blue VCSELs, blue optical phased arrays (OPAs), large-scale array of digital-to-analog converters, and coherent receiver technologies with a complexity going well beyond the state-of-the-art. By developing such an integrated blue OPA-based UOWC technology, BlueArray will enable cost-effective, robust, and scalable UOWC systems allowing the deployment of large-scale IoUT.