Data Exfiltration and Communication Architecture for Cooperative, Autonomous, Underwater, Long-endurance Sensors

AOS has developed network protocols adapted to the underwater acoustic physical layer for deploying a covert, underwater, multi-hop, relay network with all nodes outfitted with sensors. The sensor data is relayed across the network to an exfiltration node, which visits the ocean surface sparingly to maintain covertness. AOS will produce hardware and software prototypes to accomplish the mission of collecting oceanographic data from a network of freely drifting sensor nodes, each node confined to an A size sonobuoy canister, with nodes separated by as much as 10 nm, relaying their measurements over multiple hops to an exfiltration node that aggregates the collected data, visits the ocean surface, and itself relays the data over an RF satellite or radio link to the interested remote users. When initially deployed, the exfiltration node initiates a self-discovery process that establishes the initial Media Access Control (MAC) and routing for the network. Ongoing network use instances maintain the network. Link quality is monitored at the physical layer and provided to higher network layers, so that network outages can be anticipate and healed.