Robust and Reliable, Broadband Underwater Acoustic Communications
SUMMARY
Marecomms is an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that produces high quality underwater communications technology that offers superior connectivity for communication with and in between Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), oil&gas pipeline and marine farm monitoring, underwater surveillance, oceanographic instrumentation, and naval defense. Our current product, termed “ROAM (Robust Acoustic Modem)”, has been tested in extremely challenging ocean environments in partnership with Geospectrum Technologies of Dartmouth, NS, Canada, and has been shown to stably offer several kilobits to several tens of kilobits/s throughput with high fidelity.
Based on our exclusive OEM-VAR (Value Added Reseller) partnership with Geospectrum, our products are integrated with Geospectrum's state-of-the-art underwater sensors to offer a fully reliable, robust and broadband underwater acoustic wireless communication technology. (We welcome working with third party VARs based on region and application-specific licensing agreements).
In addition to “ROAM”, Marecomms is also poised to research, design and develop intellectual properties and OEM products in the broader area of wireless communication and remote sensing systems for maritime environments, including sonar systems, and marine radars.
PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY
Today’s underwater acoustic modems lack reliability and robustness in offering high data rates. As a result, monitoring of and communication with underwater assets is still a labor–intensive, costly and risky task. For instance, typical cost of an underwater oil&gas pipeline inspection cycle is on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, data access times are measured in days, and failures that may go undetected for long durations pose serious environmental risks.
SOLUTION/PRODUCT
ROAM alleviates a significant pain by maintaining high data rates in vast variety of ocean conditions. Therefore ROAM has the capacity to wirelessly transmit images and low-to-medium resolution videos in real time from underwater assets to a remote control station continuously. This offers ten–fold savings in operational costs, as well as enabling to mitigate environmental risks in a timely fashion, as data can be accessed within minutes.
ROAM is based on Marecomms’ invention in this field, encompassing some novel signal processing techniques which have been shown to successfully correct for severe distortions and corruptions that ocean propagation environment introduces to a transmitted signal. Marecomms and Geospectrum completed the construction of a test bed in December 2018, which has been used in subsequent sea trials. Through our sea trials, we validated our background theory and our algorithms.
The image below is an example of our tests in the busy harbor of Halifax, NS in June 2019, where the water depth at the transmit and receive locations were, respectively, 8 meters and 16 meters and the transmission distance was 500 meters, creating a difficult horizontal shallow water propagation environment creating a dense multipath. Water surface was moving at a velocity of 0.5 knots on average, creating Doppler spread on top of multipath propagation. There were interfering signals present in the environment and we measured a signal to interference plus noise ratio of 8 dB. Such propagation conditions are considered to be unforgiving for high throughput communication under the water.
As seen in the below image, our communication system led to a bit error rate was zero after Forward Error Correction (FEC), and the original image was perfectly reconstructed at the receiver at a net user throughput of 13.62 Kilobits/s.
We are presently working on building our first commercial unit, which will be announced herein after completion.
SUMMARY
Marecomms is an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that produces high quality underwater communications technology that offers superior connectivity for communication with and in between Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), oil&gas pipeline and marine farm monitoring, underwater surveillance, oceanographic instrumentation, and naval defense. Our current product, termed “ROAM (Robust Acoustic Modem)”, has been tested in extremely challenging ocean environments in partnership with Geospectrum Technologies of Dartmouth, NS, Canada, and has been shown to stably offer several kilobits to several tens of kilobits/s throughput with high fidelity.
Based on our exclusive OEM-VAR (Value Added Reseller) partnership with Geospectrum, our products are integrated with Geospectrum's state-of-the-art underwater sensors to offer a fully reliable, robust and broadband underwater acoustic wireless communication technology. (We welcome working with third party VARs based on region and application-specific licensing agreements).
In addition to “ROAM”, Marecomms is also poised to research, design and develop intellectual properties and OEM products in the broader area of wireless communication and remote sensing systems for maritime environments, including sonar systems, and marine radars.
PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY
Today’s underwater acoustic modems lack reliability and robustness in offering high data rates. As a result, monitoring of and communication with underwater assets is still a labor–intensive, costly and risky task. For instance, typical cost of an underwater oil&gas pipeline inspection cycle is on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, data access times are measured in days, and failures that may go undetected for long durations pose serious environmental risks.
SOLUTION/PRODUCT
ROAM alleviates a significant pain by maintaining high data rates in vast variety of ocean conditions. Therefore ROAM has the capacity to wirelessly transmit images and low-to-medium resolution videos in real time from underwater assets to a remote control station continuously. This offers ten–fold savings in operational costs, as well as enabling to mitigate environmental risks in a timely fashion, as data can be accessed within minutes.
ROAM is based on Marecomms’ invention in this field, encompassing some novel signal processing techniques which have been shown to successfully correct for severe distortions and corruptions that ocean propagation environment introduces to a transmitted signal. Marecomms and Geospectrum completed the construction of a test bed in December 2018, which has been used in subsequent sea trials. Through our sea trials, we validated our background theory and our algorithms.
The image below is an example of our tests in the busy harbor of Halifax, NS in June 2019, where the water depth at the transmit and receive locations were, respectively, 8 meters and 16 meters and the transmission distance was 500 meters, creating a difficult horizontal shallow water propagation environment creating a dense multipath. Water surface was moving at a velocity of 0.5 knots on average, creating Doppler spread on top of multipath propagation. There were interfering signals present in the environment and we measured a signal to interference plus noise ratio of 8 dB. Such propagation conditions are considered to be unforgiving for high throughput communication under the water.
As seen in the below image, our communication system led to a bit error rate was zero after Forward Error Correction (FEC), and the original image was perfectly reconstructed at the receiver at a net user throughput of 13.62 Kilobits/s.
We are presently working on building our first commercial unit, which will be announced herein after completion.
© 2019 Marecomms Inc.