Optimal communication frequency for switching cabled ocean networks with commands carried over the power line

Abstract

Cabled ocean networks with tree or ring topologies play an important role in real-time ocean exploration. Due to the time-consuming need for field maintenance, cable switching technology that can actively switch the power on/off on certain branches of the network becomes essential for enhancing the reliability and availability of the network. In this paper, a novel switching-control method is proposed, in which we invert the power transmission polarity and use the current on the power line as the digital signal at low frequency to broadcast information with the address and commands to the network, and the corresponding branching unit (BU) can decode and execute the switching commands. The cable’s parasitic parameters, the network scale, and the number of BUs, as the influencing factors of the communication frequency on the power line, are theoretically studied and simulated. An optimized frequency that balances the executing accuracy and rate is calculated and proved on a simulated prototype. The results showed that the cable switching technology with optimized frequency can enhance the switching accuracy and configuring rate.