Satellites and mobile phones, built on international standards, help the world get connected. But the communications technology we use on land does not work well underwater. As water covers over 70 percent of the earth's surface, NATO has sponsored research into establishing the first ever digital underwater communications standard.
The NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) located in La Spezia, Italy, has developed a standard for underwater acoustic communications called JANUS, which has now been recognized as a NATO standard by all NATO Allies. This marks the first time ever for a digital underwater communication protocol to be acknowledged at international level and opens the way to develop many exciting underwater communication applications.
TRANSCRIPT:
INTERVIEW RYAN GOLDHAHN, SCIENTIST, RESEARCH DEPARTMENT, CMRE
1. (00:03-00:28) The research focus of CMRE is to do ASW using a network of autonomous platforms, autonomous underwater vehicles, autonomous surface vehicles. And the idea is that, together, by sharing information, by processing their detections, their contacts, their tracks, jointly, they can achieve great performance. And necessary to that is the two vehicles communicating, and communicating to the (NRV) Alliance and communicating to surface platforms.
2. (00:29-00:46) So, communication is a big part of our experimentation, and communication underwater is tremendously difficult, much more difficult than above water: you have the much lower speed of sound compared to the speed of light in air, and that’s just a tremendously difficult environment to do communications.
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