RESEARCH Volume 9, Number 3 October 1999
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NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL RESEARCH Volume 9, Number 3 October 1999 IN THIS ISSUE FEASIBILITY ANALYSIS OF DEPLOYING WIRELESS Featured Projects ......................... 1, 4 LOCAL AREA NETWORKS (WLANS) ONBOARD Research and Education ................... 6 SUBMARINES AND SURFACE SHIPS Research Lab ................................... 8 Project Notes ................................. 10 Associate Professor Xiaoping Yun, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering NSAP Projects ............................... 12 Professor Ted Lewis, Department of Computer Science Student Research ........................... 14 LT Mark Matthews, United States Navy Assignments ................................... 17 LT Mark Roemhildt, United States Navy Faculty Editors .............................. 20 LT Kurt Rothenhaus, United States Navy Relationships ................................. 22 LT Hanceri Sayat, Turkish Army Chair Professorships....................... 23 Technology Transfer ....................... 24 Introduction Conferences/Workshops .................. 25 Since ships have limited personnel assets, it is important to increase the productivity Faculty News ................................. 26 of every crewmember aboard. The NAVSEA New Attack Submarine (NSSN) NPS Research Profile ..................... 46 program initially identified two areas, damage control (DC) communications and Conference Calendar ..................... 47 watchstander logs, for productivity improvement by deploying wireless local area Directories ..................................... 48 networks (WLANs) onboard submarines. Accurate, timely communications NPS RESEARCH between the casualty scene, different stations around the ship, and Damage Control is published by the Director of Central (DCC) have always been of the utmost importance when combating ship- Research Administration in accor- board casualties. Current damage control communications practices onboard dance with NAVSO P-35. Views and submarines rely on a slow, error prone process involving sound powered telephone opinions expressed are not necessarily talkers and a grease pencil annotated white board. The transcription of the status those of the Department of the Navy. information to the white board is limited to the rate and accuracy of a single person Comments/inquiries can be addressed receiving and writing the voice communications and is only available to those via email to [email protected]. personnel in view of the white board. There is a great need to improve DC commu- nications. The current practice of watchstander log taking has similar needs for improvement. Logs on today’s submarines are taken on paper forms, collected daily, and stapled with other watchstander logs in a large bundle. This bundle is reviewed sequentially by responsible supervisors and filed in cabinets. It is usually never looked at again. The biggest problem of this procedure is that it discourages trend analysis. If a trend analysis is to be performed, data must be either hand plotted or entered into a computer. The productivity in these and other areas can be significantly improved by deploy- ing wireless networks and mobile computing devices. In the damage control case, handheld computers connected to a wireless network could be used around the ship NAVAL POSTGRADUATE for the crew members at the casualty scene to make their report directly and elec- SCHOOL tronically to DCC. The information would be displayed at DCC and elsewhere for Superintendent situation awareness. Voice communications would still be available but could now be RADM Robert C. Chaplin reserved for the most time critical messages. In the log-taking scenario, log data Provost could be entered into a handheld computer and then wirelessly transmitted to a Dr. Richard Elster database server. This database would allow different supervisors to review the logs at Associate Provost and any time in parallel, serve as an efficient archiving source, and most importantly, Dean of Research Dr. David W. Netzer --continued on page 2 Office of the Dean of Research • Naval Postgraduate School • Monterey, California FEATURED PROJECT WIRELESS NETWORKS ONBOARD SUBMARINES, continued from page 1 allow automatic trend analysis tools to be developed to Submarines in support of the Non-Tactical Data Processing provide timely feedback to crew members. Subsystem (NTDPS). It is envisioned that a wireless local The NSSN program has been sponsoring the Submarine area network will be installed and tied to the ship’s NTDPS Wireless LAN (SWLAN) project for the past three years to wired network. A sufficient number of Access Points (APs) study the feasibility of deploying WLANs onboard subma- will be utilized to cover every corner of the ship. A crew rines. The scope of the project has been broadened to member with a handheld computer will be able to wirelessly include other submarine applications including supply access the network anywhere within the ship. The handheld inventory, PMS as well as applications onboard surface ships. computer will be equipped with a PCMCIA card that com- This article briefly describes approaches, issues, and results municates with APs at the 2.4 GHz frequency. Application of the SWLAN project. software with a web browser interface will be developed for handheld computers that allows crew members to submit DC Objectives and Approaches data and watchstander log data, view technical manuals, and The ultimate objective of the SWLAN project is to deploy order repair parts without leaving the repair scene. wireless local area networks (WLAN) onboard Virginia Class --continued on page 3 About the INVESTIGATORS Xiaoping Yun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his B.S. from Northeastern University in China followed by an M.S. and D.Sc. in Systems Science and Mathemat- ics from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Naval Post- graduate School in 1994. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of robotics, control systems, navigation systems, and wireless communica- tions. Dr. Yun is a senior member of the IEEE. He is the General Co-Chair of 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation to be held in Monterey, CA, in November 1999. Xiaoping Yun He serves on many professional society committees including IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) Award and Recognition Committee, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Board, and National Science Foundation Robotics Program Review Panel. He has published over 90 technical papers. Ted Lewis is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Prior to joining the faculty of NPS, he was a professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington State University. He has been on the faculty of four major universities spanning a 30-year academic career. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of legacy systems re- architecting using modern 3-tier software, application development of large projects, the Internet, quantitative modeling of business processes, and the application of Lanchester theory to marketing. Dr. Lewis is a prolific writer, having published over 25 books, and more than 100 technical papers. His most recent textbook is Distributed and Parallel Computing, with H. El-Rewini. His most recent popular book is The Friction Free Economy. He is a contributor or serves on editorial boards of several computing journals. Dr. Lewis is active as a consultant to both Ted Lewis the computer industry and the Department of Defense. NPS Research page 2 October 1999 FEATURED PROJECT WIRELESS NETWORKS ONBOARD SUBMARINES, continued from page 2 Research Issues Prototype software applications were written in Java with a The above approach of using wireless technology has the web browser type of interface. Java was chosen because of potential for significant improvements in shipboard opera- the distributed nature of applet architecture, and the availabil- tions. Nevertheless, there are many issues that must be ity of Java Virtual Machine (usually bundled with a browser) studied. The SWLAN project team focused its efforts in the for a wide range of processors. Applets allow users to run following three areas: programs from a remote server without requiring any client 1. Investigate the feasibility of deploying commercial-off- side setup. For damage control and other applications, the the-shelf (COTS) wireless networks in mostly metallic prototype control station was written in an applet and ran on shipboard environments. a laptop or desktop computer. The reporting agent on the 2. Evaluate COTS handheld computers and wearable client side was written in both an applet and a servlet and computers for shipboard use in connection with wireless typically ran on a handheld computer or a wearable computer. networks. A servlet version was also developed to allow it to be run on 3. Develop prototype software for damage control, smaller Window CE devices that operate a light web browser watchstander log taking, and other applications. and do not support Java applets. Commercial WLAN products utilize the 900 MHz or 2.4 As an example, Figure 1 shows the interface of the damage GHz Industrial, Science, and Medical (ISM) frequency bands. control console applet. This applet uses the Java.AWT API to They use Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FH/SS) or support the