Network design for submarine sonar systems

Typical submarine sonar system is a distributed system. To communicate data among its various components, sonars used a mix of non-standard, custom technologies many of which posed reliability, maintainability and expandability problems. Gigabit Ethernet which refers to various technologies to transfer Ethernet frames (as defined by IEEE standard) has emerged as a mature communication technology for use in defence systems due to standardization of components and protocols used. This paper presents a design of a network for submarine sonar systems primarily based on Gigabit Ethernet. Various design aspects are presented along with new network-based applications to meet sonar functionalities.