Wireless Communication through the Water-Air Interface
Abstract
We consider the problem of wireless communication across medium boundaries, specifically across the water-air interface. In particular, we are interested in enabling a deeply submerged underwater sensor to directly communicate with an airborne node. Today~s technologies cannot enable such a communication link. This is because no single type of wireless signal can operate well across different media and most wireless signals reflect back at media boundaries.We propose a new communication technology, translational acoustic-RF communication (TARF). TARF enables a submerged underwater node to directly communicate with another node suspended in air by transmitting standard acoustic signals. TARF exploits the fact that underwater acoustic signals travel as pressure waves, and that these waves cause displacements of the watersurface when they impinge on the water-air boundary. To decode the transmitted signals, TARF leverages an airborne radar which measures and decodes these surface displacements. We built an initial prototype of our technology and demonstrated that it can establish a crossmedium communication throughput of up to hundreds of bits per second, in scenarios where existing communication technologies cannot establish any link. As part of this proposal, we plan tobuild TARF into a full end-to-end wireless communication system, scale it to multiple concurrent nodes (MU-MIMO), and extend it to deal with mobility. The system will incorporate algorithms that allow it to deal with the constraints of this new communication modality, including surface waves whose amplitudes are orders of magnitude larger than the surface perturbations caused by TARF~s underwater acoustic transmitter. We will test TARF in controlled and uncontrolled environments and demonstrate that it enables direct wireless communication through the water-air interface, transforming the obstacle itself into a means for communication. If successful, the proposed research will deliver the first system that enables uplink wireless communication between deeply submerged underwater nodes and airborne nodes. Such communication can provide the Navy with unique and revolutionary capabilities. Its applications includesubmarine security, jamming-resilient communication, search and recovery, and deep-sea exploration with unmanned underwater vehicles and long-term deployed sensors. Finally, the proposal describes how this research aligns with all five of ONR~s framework priorities.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- May 23, 2019
- Source ID
- N000141912325
Entities
People
- Fadel Adib
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy