GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

The proposals must address research of secure underwater communication, with focus on acoustic technologies, including networked solutions, that contribute to the improvement of current performance, through the creation of new low-distortion modulation techniques, interference avoidance/suppression mechanisms, recovery from fading, etc. This requires the communication to be highly adaptive and self-reconfigurable. To improve the performance of the acoustic underwater communication channel, the environmental conditions in situ, such as noise, depth, sound velocity profile, etc., must be considered.

Furthermore, research in underwater communication, with focus on optical technologies, must be addressed, with the aim of improving bandwidth and transmission distance, reducing signal distortion, in order to improve  communication within and between platforms, networks and infrastructures. The security aspects should be included in the underwater communication systems. The challenging communication conditions (low data rate, long latency, delay and doppler spread effects, highly varying channel conditions and high noise levels, etc), which may result in unreliable and low-bandwidth communication links, also give special challenges for security mechanisms. This should be taken into account in the design of the complete communication system (modulations, network protocols, etc), carefully balancing modular/layered approaches and cross-layer approaches. During the design, performance metrics describing efficiency and robustness should always be assessed, to avoid that this gets too much compromised by the security measures. Also, encryption methods should be considered in order to obtain metrics about its efficiency.

Different encryption methods can be used depending on the mission state, data classification level, etc. The suggested design solutions should be tested in a realistic environment in salt water.