SBIR-STTR Award

While reliability and security remain top concerns in the use of wireless networks in shipboard machinery spaces, the benefits are too alluring to ignore. Among them: reduced manning; wiring, installation, and maintenance cost savings; substantial weight and space savings thru the elimination of wiring; design and expansion flexibility; and the promise of improved survivability thru the use of ad-hoc mesh networks. Wireless communication within shipboard compartments has gathered considerable attention in recent years and substantial progress has been made to address thorny interference, signal shielding, multi-path fading, and dispersion problems. The typical approach involves a hybrid network with wireless access points linked to the ships wired network backbone (e.g., FODMS on DDG-51 class). Little (if any) attention has been given to a ship-wide wireless-only network infrastructure that effectively eliminates bulkhead penetrations. This effort aims to assess the effectiveness of multiple communication modalities thru metal structures. A proof-of-concept prototype repeater will be developed to retransmit RF signals from one compartment to another.

Benefit:
A secure and reliable wireless communication infrastructure for application in shipboard machinery control provides many benefits. Among them: reduced manning; wiring, installation, and maintenance cost savings; substantial weight and space savings thru the elimination of wiring; design and expansion flexibility; and the promise of improved survivability thru the use of ad-hoc mesh networks. Thru the bulkhead wireless transmission provides alternate data paths that can serve as a backup channel for wired networks to enhance survivability. This technology would also be desirable in the context of Homeland Security. As a small example of broader opportunities, there are needs to place wireless devices inside metal containers to monitor biological factors and to ensure no tampering occurs while those containers move through the ports. Wireless sensing for machinery control, when adapted to the needs of containers and other port related machinery, would be a critical part of the infrastructure roadmap to be deployed in support of directed appropriations.

Keywords:
ZigBee, ZigBee, machinery control, Wireless Sensor Network

As the reliability of wireless communication technologies improves, applications that currently rely on wired protocols may be replaced by wireless counterparts. The advantages include increased survivability, lower installation, maintenance, and system upgrade costs, and reduced size and weight. In this proposal, we explain how we will develop and expand the wireless and through-the-bulkhead prototypes that we built and demonstrated during Phase I into rugged, deployable solutions ready for production and installation on Navy vessels. Using feasibility and experimental results from Phase I, we propose to develop a full-scale deployment-ready wireless network for survivable machinery control applications on U.S. Navy ships. This network will be capable of providing a reliable supplement to existing hardwired control infrastructure, and to carry the full network load should damage occur to the primary (hardwired) network. In addition to the wireless component, our network contains stand alone through-the-bulkhead repeaters (TTBR) that use ultrasonic transducers and sophisticated signal processing algorithms to achieve high-data transmission rates.

Benefit:
The U.S. Navy has expressed considerable interest in wireless networking technology in recent years. While reliability and security remain top concerns in the shipboard machinery environment, the benefits of wireless communication are too alluring to ignore. Among them: reduced manning, cost savings, substantial weight and space savings thru the elimination of wiring, design flexibility, and the promise of improved survivability thru the use of ad-hoc mesh networks.

Keywords:
Wireless, ZigBee, Repeater, Signal processing, Monitoring, Sensors, ultrasonics