Maritime Data Transfer Protocol (MDTP): A Proposal for a Data Transmission Protocol in Resource-Constrained Underwater Environments Involving Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The utilization of autonomous maritime vehicles is becoming widespread in operations that are deemed too hazardous for humans to be directly involved in them. One of the ways to increase the productivity of the tools used during missions is the deployment of several vehicles with the same objective regarding data collection and transfer, both for the benefit of human staff and policy makers. However, the interchange of data in such an environment poses major challenges, such as a low bandwidth and the unreliability of the environment where transmissions take place. Furthermore, the relevant information that must be sent, as well as the exact size that will allow understanding it, is usually not clearly established, as standardization works are scarce in this domain. Under these conditions, establishing a way to interchange information at the data level among autonomous maritime vehicles becomes of critical importance since the needed information, along with the size of the transferred data, will have to be defined. This manuscript puts forward the Maritime Data Transfer Protocol, (MDTP) a way to interchange standardized pieces of information at the data level for maritime autonomous maritime vehicles, as well as the procedures that are required for information interchange.

ScaleUp: middleware for intelligent environments

“…On the contrary, Rodríguez-Molina et al (2017) have interweaved other technologies with middleware such as acoustic networks and wireless communications. Under such circumstances, Rodríguez-Molina et al (2017) have established an approach for interchanging information at the data level among independent maritime vehicles, which is of significant importance as the required information will have to be defined, along with the size of transferred data. Rodríguez-Molina et al (2017) have forwarded the Maritime Data Transfer Protocol for interchanging standardized aspects of information at the data level for maritime independent maritime vehicles, and the procedures that are needed for information interchange.…”

Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

“…Figure 2 illustrates the SWARMs ontology for mission and planning. The mission plan is generated at the MMT using one of the available high-level planners [47][48][49], and sent to the MTTR through an Apache Thrift [50,51] interface using an ad hoc format whose structure is shown in Figure 3. Each mission plan is identified by its missionId, and consists of a hierarchical list of actions and the list of vehicles participating in the mission.…”

“…Information storage invocation. Data about how vehicles have progressed in a specific mission are retrieved via state vectors that contain, among other pieces of information, their location, speed, depth or altitude from the seabed, according to a data format specifically developed for the project [51]. The MTRR invokes the necessary operations that involve other software components in the middleware responsible for storing the data gathered.…”

An Optimized, Data Distribution Service-Based Solution for Reliable Data Exchange Among Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

“…As far as the length of the information included is concerned, it was formatted as a Protocol Data Unit of the protocol that has been described at [ 48 ], so it was guaranteed that the PDU would not be too long and would be challenging to be handled by the acoustic network used to transfer data at a level below the semantic middleware solution. Specifically, the length of the fields that were contained was as follows: The type of message that was sent was included in the lower 4 bits of the byte that was used to encase both the vehicle identifier and this piece of information.…”