A Basic Bio-Inspired Camouflage Communication Frame Design and Applications for Secure Underwater Communication Among Military Underwater Platforms

Abstract

Many marine mammal species, such as different kinds of whales and dolphins, live together in groups. Although having no nice eyesight, they can accomplish cooperative foraging, inter-communication and group sailing very efficiently and accurately only depending on their sound. Generally, present interception systems almost always classify biological signals as ocean noise and try to filter them out. In addition, the covertness and security are very important for many military underwater platforms (MUPs) and their formations. Based on above classification fact and covert communication demand, this article designs a basic bio-inspired camouflage communication frame (BBICCF) for secure underwater communication among military underwater platforms based on the killer whale sound. According to characteristics of the killer whales' original call pulse trains, the original long duration call pulses (whistles and pulsed calls) are utilized as communication address codes for each MUP so as to provide disguised communication addressing support for interconnection among multiple MUPs in the same formation, and the original short duration call pulses (clicks) are used as other communication codes, so as to construct BBICCF for highly camouflaged conveying communication information. A simple and effective time-frequency (TF) contour extraction method is proposed to achieve the accurate extraction of the TF contour of the fundamental frequency of whistles and pulsed calls of killer whales for efficient classification and decoding of address codes. Next, this article provides some extensions and applications about how to let the BBICCF to be applied in conventional communication networks for MUP formation. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness and concealment ability of designed BBICCF. INDEX TERMS Secure communication network, underwater communications, whale sound, underwater formation. I. INTRODUCTION With the development of technology, more and more autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), glider and varieties of formations composed of them are used in many military application scenarios from surveillance and anti-submarine, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Xingwang Li. to reconnaissance and mine detection etc. [1]-[3]. Compared with single MUP, the formation composed of multiple MUPs can accomplish more complex, wider range, and more reliable military tasks [4], [5], just as multitudinous group animals in nature, such as whales, swarms, wolf packs etc.. However, the accomplishment of collaborative tasks among the MUPs, such as cooperative localization, sailing of multiple platforms, interaction of the order/data among multiple

Internet of Underwater Things and Big Marine Data Analytics—A Comprehensive Survey

“…Recent studies have verified the efficiency and feasibility of this scheme in IoUT, when the transmitted signal is camouflaged with marine mammal voices (e.g. killer whales) [100], ship-radiated noise [101], etc. On the other hand, secure protocols can also be employed by IoUT architectural layers for ensuring network-threat-resilient underwater communications.…”

“…In addition to the above methods, camouflaged data transmission is another creative technique of covert communications. Generally speaking, the eavesdropping systems classify engine sounds, environmental noises, and biological voices as ocean noise and try to filter them [100]. Here, the underwater acoustic communications can benefit from shaping their output signals in accordance to the time and frequency features of a targeted chaotic signal.…”

Bionic Covert Underwater Acoustic Communication Based on Time–Frequency Contour of Bottlenose Dolphin Whistle

“…Since the usage of sound to achieve covert UAC was first proposed by the Office of Naval Research in 2001 [16], many BC-UAC methods have been proposed [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31].…”

Acoustic projectors make covert bioacoustic chirplet signals discoverable

“…Tests in simulations and sea experiments show good BER with error correction coding, and a good level of mimicry. Jiajia et al 10 encode the information to be transmitted into the inter-click intervals of killer whale vocalizations used to localize targets. Similarly, Ahn et al 11 propose to encode bit sequences in the transition between different types of mimicked dolphin whistles, and resort to machine learning to identify different whistles in the spectrogram of a received acoustic signal.…”

“…Our work informs biomimicking system design based on engineered as well as played-back animal sounds by evaluating how the emitted signals really resemble natural sounds. In fact, time-based signal modulations 10 , 17 , 19 , frequency-based modulations 9 , 13 , and even direct playback 12 , 16 can be put in jeopardy if the last element of the transmitter chain (i.e., the transducer) exposes the emitted signal as a non-natural one.…”