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The performance of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC)-coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is investigated over turbulence channels in underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC). The relation between the bit error ratio (BER) and parameters such as the scintillation coefficient, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), length of LDPC code, and order of OFDM is quantified by simulation. Results show that while the OFDM with subcarrier quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM-OFDM) has slightly better anti-turbulence performance than the OFDM with subcarrier phase shift keying modulation (PSK-OFDM), the LDPC-coded QAM-OFDM has a much better performance than the QAM-OFDM and the LDPC-coded PSK-OFDM, and, at SNR = 12, it decreases the BER by four orders of magnitude compared to the 16QAM-OFDM system when the scintillation coefficient σξ2 = 0.05.

Due to the influence of the atmospheric environment and pointing errors, the performance of free space optical communication is greatly limited. In this paper, we propose a parallel multi-hop hybrid free space optical (FSO)/radio frequency (RF) system to improve the system performance. The FSO sub-link and RF sub-link are modeled by Gamma–Gamma turbulence with pointing errors and Nakagami-m distributions, respectively. Based on the selective combination scheme, the probability density function (PDF) and cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the hybrid FSO/RF one-hop or direct link are obtained. Then, the PDF and CDF of the output SNR of the parallel multi-hop hybrid system are derived with the decoded forward (DF) protocol considered. Finally, the expressions of the average bit error rate (ABER) and outage probability are derived for the parallel multi-hop hybrid system, the hybrid FSO/RF direct link, and the FSO-only direct link. The results show that the parallel multi-hop hybrid system can effectively mitigate the negative impact of atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors and can significantly improve the system performance.