Wireless Sensing for Survivable Machinery Control

As the reliability of wireless communication technologies improves, applications that currently rely on wired protocols may be replaced by wireless counterparts. The advantages include increased survivability, lower installation, maintenance, and system upgrade costs, and reduced size and weight. In this proposal, we explain how we will develop and expand the wireless and through-the-bulkhead prototypes that we built and demonstrated during Phase I into rugged, deployable solutions ready for production and installation on Navy vessels. Using feasibility and experimental results from Phase I, we propose to develop a full-scale deployment-ready wireless network for survivable machinery control applications on U.S. Navy ships. This network will be capable of providing a reliable supplement to existing hardwired control infrastructure, and to carry the full network load should damage occur to the primary (hardwired) network. In addition to the wireless component, our network contains stand alone through-the-bulkhead repeaters (TTBR) that use ultrasonic transducers and sophisticated signal processing algorithms to achieve high-data transmission rates.