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

Applied Ocean Sciences and Raytheon BBN propose a methodology to address a need for smart underwater networking.  The network should be adaptive and robust as well as vehicle/node agnostic.  AOS plans to develop their Smart Exfiltration Multi Point Relay (SEMPR) network, an underwater acoustic network by employing concepts from terrestrial networking and combining those with BBNs acoustic communication modules.  Because of the difficulties in underwater communications (bandwidth, ranges, changing environments), these methodologies will need to be modified to be as redundant as possible but still be efficient and secure.  In SEMPR, specialized nodes aggregate data from an ad hoc mobile network of sensing nodes (edge and relay nodes), and exfiltrate this data via RF to users of this data.  SEMPR uses an initial self-discovery process to produce a distributed smart routing table, which is then used to transport both sensed data and link quality through the relay network back to the exfiltration node.  The messages will be transmitted using BBNs low power acoustic modem modules which use a CDMA protocol.  This protocol may be modified to fit the networking scheme.