RR4DSN: Reconfigurable Receiver for Deepwater Sensor Nodes

The deep water environment is harsh and hostile. As the depth increases, the pressure rises and the temperature decreases significantly. These have devastating effects on electronics and could lead to hard errors. The failure of electronic components in a monitoring system could be catastrophic. In addition, the remoteness of the underwater environments makes it even more challenging. Another layer of complication is added when the telemetry system for the installation, such as pipelines, employ linear sensor networks. Failure of certain sensor nodes could lead to segmentation of the network. The approach has been to ensure the end-to-end reliability of the network at the expense of the reliability of each of the nodes. Therefore, we propose a self-healing and fault-tolerant receiver for deep-water application in this paper. It is designed to recover from hard or permanent faults. At the heart of the system is an Internal Configuration Access Port (ICAP) controller performing task configuration to ensure that any faulty part of the system is dynamically reconfigured. Our preliminary result shows that one of the central tasks of our proposed system, digital down converter (DDC) can recover from five permanent damages on the chip. By extending the same technique to the whole receiver, and comparing this with the state-of-the-art approaches, it is estimated that our system is capable of 257% improvement in reliability.