How smartphone industry made UComms easier: Moore´s law goes underwater

In the framework of a bilateral Netherlands-Norway defense research cooperation (2014-2017) between The Netherlands Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO NL) and Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt (FFI NO), it has been shown that a compact general-purpose processor board developed for smartphones can be successfully used for real-time underwater communications using a state-of-the-art spread-spectrum modulation programmed in hardware-independent C code. The board has been integrated in a handful of bottom nodes and a ship node, and initial data-link and network communication experiments were performed in a shallow Norwegian fjord. In this paper, the modem system is described and preliminary communication results are presented.