Experimental Study and Results on Real-Time Communication via Gigabit Ethernet in Underwater Sensor Array Systems

The paper focuses on Ethernet based data transfers in real-time processing systems. These systems require fast and reliable data transfers among all the involved resources. In underwater acoustic processing systems, large amount of data is digitized, processed and displayed in real-time. These systems involve hundreds of acoustic sensors producing analog signals that are digitized and generate a large set of data points to be transferred to other processing units in a real-time. This time constraint is important in underwater applications as the processed data displayed to the system operator is critical for undersea operations. Data losses are not acceptable because it may result in incorrect information for the system operator thereby producing a wrong interpretation of the incoming information. Hence an efficient and reliable data transfer mechanism to meet real-time constraint becomes imperative. In this paper we have proposed a Gigabit Ethernet based data transfer methodology using TCP/IP for data transfers among different processing units of an underwater acoustic processing system. Here we have attempted to address some important challenges such as large amount of data to be transferred efficiently in a computer network and the ability to meet processing time (on average) required for successful completion of Gigabit Ethernet based data transfers.