An SDN architecture for under water search and surveillance

Underwater Wireless Networking (UWN) schemes and applications have been attracting considerable interest with both industry and the research community. The nature of water, as a carrier medium, imposes very significant constraints on the both the characteristics and information carrying capacity of underwater communication channels. Currently, acoustic and optical are the two main physical platform/channel choices. Acoustics offers relative simplicity but low data rates. Optical has a considerable bandwidth advantage, but is much more complex to implement, exploit and manage. Leveraging both technologies enables exploitation of their complementarities and synergies. A Software Defined Networking architecture, which separates the control and data planes, enables full exploitation of this acousto-optic combination. In this configuration, the longer-ranged acoustic channel serves as the control plane, allowing the controller to issue mobility and network related commands to distant AUVs, whilst the shorter range (but higher throughput) optical channel serves as the data plane, thereby allowing for fast transfer of data. This paper presents such a system, employing the NATO approved JANUS underwater communications standard for the control channel.