Tutorial 6 intro: JANUS: The first digital underwater communications standard

Tutorial 6 intro: JANUS: The first digital underwater communications standard

For over 70 years, the only underwater (UW) communications standard has been the analogue UW telephone, known as ‘Gertrude’. With the rapid rise in the availability and use of autonomous UW assets, there has been a pressing need for a wireless digital UW communications standard that can be used to convey any type of data and support machine-to-machine exchanges. JANUS answers this need and is the result of over 10 years of effort, led by the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), funded by NATO ACT and involving contributions from many international research centres, modem designers, producers and users. The standard known as JANUS has now been approved by NATO and is to be implemented across naval assets of all 29 NATO nations. But JANUS is not restricted to NATO, indeed not even restricted to military use, but it is open and available to both military and civilian use worldwide. The adoption by NATO navies is just the start. Driven initially by naval demand, we soon expect many UW modems to be offering JANUS as a communication protocol option, and to see its use spread to offshore oil and gas operations, oceanographic surveying, diver support and many other applications. JANUS not only provides an interoperable UW communications protocol for point-to-point communications, but also offers a bootstrapping method for node discovery and the construction of dynamic ad-hoc networks. JANUS also offers the potential to dynamically negotiate and de-conflict operations that may not have been coordinated in prior planning, but which discover each other during operation. This tutorial will describe JANUS and current JANUS-related activities, including at-sea experimentation in support of real-life applications, such as support of Submarine Escape and Rescue (SMER) operations.

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The tutorials are consisted of introduction presentation of 30 minutes and hands-on part of 60min. Tutorial hands-on and demos are divided in three groups which will rotate together every hour: