Wireless Sensing for Survivable Machinery Control

Among the Navy’s goals for new ship construction in the 21st century are to achieve cost savings in ship installation, to increase survivability of the vital communications infrastructure, and to enable manning reductions through highly automated ship operations. The rapid advancements and proliferation of wireless technology makes it a primary candidate for adaptation to machinery and total ship control systems in support of these objectives. In the Phase I effort, particular challenges were addressed to enable wireless sensing for survivable machinery control including communications through and around steel ship compartments, software architectures for distributed control on these networks, achieving necessary bandwidth in such wireless networks, and doing so with minimum power requirements and so that communications and processing can use stored or scavenged power. The technical objectives of the N05-T020 Phase II efforts are to design, develop, fabricate and characterize a prototype hybrid wireless network capable of transmission through several bulkheads. Functional prototypes of each of the primary systems building blocks will be developed consisting of the following units: Network Gateway, Wireless Bridge, Wireless Hub, and Machinery Control Unit. A laboratory demonstration system will be fabricated with at least one each of these units.