SBIR Phase II: Megabit-Per-Second Underwater Wireless Communications

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the introduction of high-speed wireless modems usable subsea and significant cost reduction of deep-water operations ? industry experts estimate savings of nearly 20% of deep-water operations through the availability of subsea WiFi. Today, there is no broadband wireless communication available underwater. In the deep ocean, remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) require a tether for communication and a support ship for tether management; sensors and systems must either be physically connected, or retrieved from the deep sea to exchange data. An ROV support ship costs about $120k/day leading to over $7B spent on ROV support ships in 2013. The proposed megabit-per-second technology would allow ROV manufacturers and operators to cut the tether on many of their vehicles. Wireless ROVs can move unencumbered throughout coverage area, piloted from anywhere (e.g. from Houston), without expensive surface vessels. The proposed wireless modem technology connects ROVs and machinery to wired infrastructure, enabling safe operation of heavy subsea machinery without the possibility of cables or tethers getting tangled, causing damage or worse. This project will create 10 new jobs in the next three years, with many more to be added as the production scales. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 2 project proposes to develop a faster and more reliable wireless communication system for the sub-sea industry. Current state of the art communication links for the deep ocean are either tethered, requiring long, bulky, and expensive cables to connect machinery and systems, or have extremely low data rates, enabling only the most rudimentary of tasks. The proposed underwater wireless communication system will provide WiFi-like data rates in the Mbps (megabits/sec) range ? 100 to 1,000 times faster than existing underwater wireless communication technologies - and enable video streaming and real-time control of subsea infrastructure, machinery, and mobile underwater vehicles. Since radio signals do not propagate far underwater, the proposed technology uses sound waves, as whales and dolphins do, for communication. The speed of sound is 200,000 times slower than the speed of radio propagation, and mobile acoustic transmitters and receivers hence suffer from severe Doppler distortion. The proposed technology dynamically measures, tracks, and compensates for this distortion, to enable wireless communication at data rates never before possible underwater.