Hydronet: An Open, Modular, and Programmable Underwater Modem

Commercial  technologies  to  create  wireless  networks  of  underwater  unmanned  vehicles  (UUV)  or  static  sensing  devices are limited to a few proprietary solutions that fall short of providing the flexibility, performance, and ability to adapt their networking capabilities to the time-varying environments that characterize underwater missions in the military and commercial domains. In stark contrast, the commercial wireless domain is advancing at a fast pace. The 5G commercial ecosystem is proposing new architectures based on open interfaces, disaggregation of functionalities from the hardware fabric, and virtualization of networking functionalities, thus creating a fertile ecosystem for innovation. This project will build on technology licensed by Bionet Sonar from Northeastern University to develop the Hydronet Wideband Modular Modem (WMM), a hardened, commercial-grade  software-defined  underwater modem with small form factor and the capabilities to operate at up to 10 MHz. Hydronet WMM will be based on an open, modular architecture informed by developments in the commercial and open source communities. The Hydronet architecture will provide the flexibility to define, add, update, and swap components in both hardware and software; as well as to develop control applications able to adapt the behavior of the modem for different environments and applications. Hydronet WMM will have a fully programmable software architecture, which enables the capability to (i) add/update functionalities at all layers of the protocol stack; (ii) operate at every layer of the protocol stack with an option to hide the implementation details of each layer; (iii) implement cross-layer control strategies through a structured architecture; (iv) reprogram physical layer functionalities (i.e., modulation, coding, power, as well as switching between different physical layer schemes altogether) running on a programmable logic in real time; and (v) natively support Internet-based applications and network monitoring tools through a Linux operating system.  Hydronet WMM will expose a set of pre-defined primitives at each layer to enable the design of cross-layer control applications to be executed on a common centralized control interface designed to jointly control both hardware (e.g., through reconfigurable FPGA) and a software-defined networking protocol stack to adapt to temporally and spatially varying channel conditions, network topology, and network traffic. A broad set of software libraries will be made available to ease the definition of new networking concepts.