Underwater wireless optical communication is one of the critical technologies for buoy-based high-speed cross-sea surface communication, where the communication nodes are vertically deployed. Due to the vertically inhomogeneous nature of the underwater environment, seawater is usually vertically divided into multiple layers with different parameters that reflect the real environment. In this work, we consider a generalized UWOC channel model that contains$N$ layers. To capture the effects of air bubbles and temperature gradients on channel statistics, we model each layer by a mixture Exponential-Generalized Gamma(EGG) distribution. We derive the PDF and CDF of the end-to-end SNR in exact closed-form. Then, unified BER and outage expressions using OOK and BPSK are also derived. The performance and behavior of common vertical underwater optical communication scenarios are thoroughly analyzed through the appropriate selection of parameters. All the derived expressions are verified via Monte Carlo simulations.
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