NEMO: An architecture for software communications research in the maritime domain

Abstract

This paper presents a high-level overview of NEMO, an implementation of a communications research software workspace with special focus on application scenarios involving underwater (e.g. acoustic), and other maritime communications methods. The NEMO is an organic result of marine autonomy and communications experimentation, basically being composed of reconfigurable modules and services that interact with each other via an IPC (MOOS). The nominal NEMO configuration includes drivers for hardware devices, a simple MAC scheme, encoding, bundling, and queuing utilities, as well as a simple flooding router. Additionally, an implicit acknowledgement algorithm is proposed, the herald, that provides a mechanism for arbitrary payloads to be synchronised across the network with a configurable level of assurance. Lastly, an abstraction called the codex is presented, providing queuing, bundling and encoding functionalities in a single process, providing a high-level, packet-agnostic staging area for application data.