Video-Capable Underwater Mobile Phone: Diver Phone

U.S. military divers are tasked with carrying out challenging missions around the globe — missions that are unnecessarily hampered by their limited ability to communicate when submerged. Radio signals are commonly used for wireless communication on land, but propagate poorly underwater. Acoustic signals, on the other hand, pass through water easily, but existing acoustic communication products are far inferior to their radio-based counterparts and have seen little improvement over the past 40 years. An analog communication technology introduced to the diving market in the 1980s, single-sideband modulation, is still the de facto standard for through-water voice communication despite its high sensitivity to reverberation and noise. Digital methods for through-water communication exist, but suffer from extremely low data rates, on the order of 100 bits per second (bps), satisfactory only for the most rudimentary applications such as text messaging to and from diver-carried computers. We propose the development of Diver Phone, an underwater mobile device that offers wireless data-transfer rates suitable for digital voice and video, reliable positioning capability, and a small form factor easily carried by divers. Diving without a tether but in tight coordination with the commander via voice and video as enabled by Diver Phone will dramatically improve tactical agility in the new and technologically-evolving subsea theater.