Monitoring Paradigm for Deepwater Subsea Pipeline Laying and Key Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Technologies

LI Ziqing; HE Ning; CHEN Jianyi; WEI Jiaguang; FENG Xiaowei; HE Wenxuan; LIAO Peixuan; XIE Chenhua

doi:10.11993/j.issn.2096-3920.2025-0159

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LI Ziqing, HE Ning, CHEN Jianyi, WEI Jiaguang, FENG Xiaowei, HE Wenxuan, LIAO Peixuan, XIE Chenhua. Monitoring Paradigm for Deepwater Subsea Pipeline Laying and Key Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Technologies[J]. Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems. doi: 10.11993/j.issn.2096-3920.2025-0159

Citation:

LI Ziqing, HE Ning, CHEN Jianyi, WEI Jiaguang, FENG Xiaowei, HE Wenxuan, LIAO Peixuan, XIE Chenhua. Monitoring Paradigm for Deepwater Subsea Pipeline Laying and Key Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Technologies[J]. Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems. doi: 10.11993/j.issn.2096-3920.2025-0159

Citation:

LI Ziqing, HE Ning, CHEN Jianyi, WEI Jiaguang, FENG Xiaowei, HE Wenxuan, LIAO Peixuan, XIE Chenhua. Monitoring Paradigm for Deepwater Subsea Pipeline Laying and Key Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Technologies[J]. Journal of Unmanned Undersea Systems. doi: 10.11993/j.issn.2096-3920.2025-0159

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Monitoring Paradigm for Deepwater Subsea Pipeline Laying and Key Underwater Wireless Optical Communication Technologies

doi: 10.11993/j.issn.2096-3920.2025-0159

1.
College of Mechanical and Transportation Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, China
2.
Offshore Oil Engineering Co., Ltd., Tianjin 300461, China
3.
Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an 710119, China

Received Date: 2025-11-26
Accepted Date: 2026-01-13
Rev Recd Date: 2025-12-24

Available Online: 2026-07-16

Abstract

Abstract

To address the high multi-vessel coordination cost, limited timeliness, and stringent constraints of tethered operations in near-bottom monitoring of the touchdown point(TDP) during deepwater pipeline laying, an integrated monitoring architecture comprising an unmanned surface vehicle(USV), a towed/telemetry module(TMS), and an autonomous/remote underwater vehicle(ARV) is developed, together with a vertical underwater wireless optical communication(UWOC) scheme. A vertical UWOC approach based on quasi-omnidirectional LED array emission and adaptive receive-threshold control is proposed and evaluated. First, depth-dependent absorption and scattering attenuation coefficients are established from the chlorophyll concentration profile; under Lambertian, quasi-omnidirectional LED-array boundary conditions, Monte Carlo photon tracing with the Henyey–Greenstein(HG) phase function is introduced to overcome the bias of the constant-parameter Beer–Lambert approximation in spatially varying media, yielding the spatial distribution of received power and the 90% confidence coverage radius. Second, a hardware–software integrated implementation is completed: the transmitter employs blue/green LED arrays with secondary optics, the receiver adopts a large-aperture photomultiplier tube(PMT) with a narrowband filter, and OOK/IM-DD is used as the signaling scheme. At the software layer, a sliding-window adaptive threshold and gain control method(CFAR+AGC) jointly adjusts transmit power and receive gain, reducing reliance on high-precision pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT). Water-tank experiments verify link stability, pointing tolerance, and multi-rate performance(6~20 Mbps); open-sea trials in the Wenchang 16-2 field achieve a stable communication range of approximately 17 m under a water attenuation coefficient of 0.58 m⁻¹, with error-free transmission at 6.25 Mbps and robustness to relative motion and ambient-light fluctuations. The results demonstrate that the proposed closed-loop “layered channel–quasi-omnidirectional emission–adaptive reception” approach has strong transferability and engineering effectiveness, enabling continuous deepwater TDP monitoring without additional MSV deployment, thereby reducing cost and improving operational safety and timeliness.

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References(28)

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