November 17, 2018

Underwater modem with a co-processor

It is a common need for someone to integrate their own systems with the underwater modems. For example, a customer required a co-processor to be connected to the underwater modem using a network interface, over which the they wanted to interact with the modems and develop their own algorithms and applications. Subnero underwater modems provide options for easy customization and extension. We took this requirement and provided a solution which is illustrated in the block diagram below:

The custom offering enclosed a modem along with a co-processor as shown in the figure. The external interface exposed the ethernet and power connectors to the modem. The co-processor was made accessible over SSH over a certain port on the same IP address as the modem. Once logged into the co-processor, the customer was able to deploy their applications and algorithms to run with close proximity to the modem hardware.

The best part is that the modem can be accessed from the co-processor using a set of standard Unet APIs. In order to be able to use the same APIs, UnetStack running on the Subnero underwater modems, provides a Gateway class. This class provides the user to communicate with the agents running in UnetStack on the modem. This class is utilized and the APIs are developed for the user to build their application upon. The APIs to interact with the modem from any computer (in this case the co-processor) are available in a variety of programming languages such as Java, Groovy, C and Python. Interested reader can read more details on basic operations of modem using Gateway in this UnetStack blog article.