Lightweight Network Architecture for Tethered Underwater Vehicles

A remotely controlled tethered underwater vehicle, or ROV for short, is an unmanned submersible which replaces manned submarines in any cases where the use of the latter is impractical. All modern ROVs use some form of networking to control the movement and obtain data from various sensors. As many of the ROV modules operate underwater, using off-the-shelf network equipment is problematic due to expensive shielding and specialised underwater cables. In this paper, a network architecture is proposed, which significantly reduces the ROV cost, complexity, and maintenance, while improving reliability at the same time. The architecture allows the underwater ROV modules to communicate with a novel lightweight protocol over a low wire count physical layer. The solution is implemented and tested in a commercial vehicle developed for Technical University-Varna, Bulgaria.