Undersea Distributed Networked System: An Enabling Power and Communications Infrastructure Technology

Monitoring the ocean, whether for defense, port security or oceanographic and climatological purposes is becoming increasingly important. As a result there is need for a flexible, reliable, economical and easy way to deploy infrastructure for providing power and communication pathways to sensor arrays. In this paper we will describe three key subsystems which, when combined with standard undersea telecom cable and commercially available connectors, create a complete infrastructure to support an undersea array of sensors. A generic depiction of a typical deployment showing the key subsystems and components was shown in the paper.