A Basic Bio-Inspired Camouflage Communication Frame Design and Applications for Secure Underwater Communication Among Military Underwater Platforms

Jiang Jiajia,Sun Zhongbo,Fu Xiao,Duan Fajie,Wang Xianquan,Li Chunyue

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2970746

Jiang Jiajia, Sun Zhongbo + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.2970746

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Abstract

Many marine mammal species, such as different kinds of whales and dolphins, live together in groups. Although having no nice eyesight, they can accomplish cooperative foraging, inter-communication and group sailing very efficiently and accurately only depending on their sound. Generally, present interception systems almost always classify biological signals as ocean noise and try to filter them out. In addition, the covertness and security are very important for many military underwater platforms (MUPs) and their formations. Based on above classification fact and covert communication demand, this article designs a basic bio-inspired camouflage communication frame (BBICCF) for secure underwater communication among military underwater platforms based on the killer whale sound. According to characteristics of the killer whales’ original call pulse trains, the original long duration call pulses (whistles and pulsed calls) are utilized as communication address codes for each MUP so as to provide disguised communication addressing support for interconnection among multiple MUPs in the same formation, and the original short duration call pulses (clicks) are used as other communication codes, so as to construct BBICCF for highly camouflaged conveying communication information. A simple and effective time-frequency (TF) contour extraction method is proposed to achieve the accurate extraction of the TF contour of the fundamental frequency of whistles and pulsed calls of killer whales for efficient classification and decoding of address codes. Next, this article provides some extensions and applications about how to let the BBICCF to be applied in conventional communication networks for MUP formation. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness and concealment ability of designed BBICCF.

Highlights

With the development of technology, more and more autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), glider and varieties of formations composed of them are used in many military application scenarios from surveillance and anti-submarine, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Xingwang Li .to reconnaissance and mine detection etc. [1]–[3]
2) Make full use of different types, features and permutation law of the calls of killer whales, we propose to use whistles and pulsed calls to serve as the address codes for communication network, utilize the TF shapes of whistles and pulsed calls to distinguish different address codes, employ clicks of killer whales to serve as the information carrier, and use time delay difference (TDD) among communication codes to form the communication sequence, which can highly match the features and permutation law of the calls of killer whales and obtain high camouflage ability
Please note that since the communication frame is the basic unit and basis of information interaction in communication networks, so this paper focuses on the design of camouflage communication frames and do not discuss the network protocol

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the development of technology, more and more autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), glider and varieties of formations composed of them are used in many military application scenarios from surveillance and anti-submarine, The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Xingwang Li. An interesting and underinvestigated idea comes to our minds that if using the original biological acoustic signals (e.g. killer whale sound) to serve as communication codes, construct camouflage communication frame, transmit them according the characteristics of killer whales’ call pulse trains, and establish communication network by imitating the social network of the killer whale group, we will probably be able to develop a covert communication information interaction method for MUP formations. STRUCTURE DESIGN OF THE BBICCF According to the characteristics of both the social network and call pulse trains of killer whales, a BBICCF is designed as Fig.3 It is composed of the destination address (DA), the source address (SA), the synchronization code (SC), the group-number indicator (GNI), the group-hopping indicator (GHI) and the information code (IC). According to the pick method (PM) method in [38], and when setting the NE threshold value Et to 0.5, the width of rectangle window (used to pick out each click) to 22ms, M to 4 and N to 4, respectively, 53 groups of clicks were obtained and are able to be used to encode the communication information based on the same principle as [38]

SELECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF DISTINCT COMMUNICATION ADDRESS CODES

EVALUATION

VIII. CONCLUSION