The deep-water environment is harsh and hostile. As the depth increases, the pressure rises and the temperature decreases significantly. There has also been report of radiation in the deep-sea environment. All these have devastating effects on electronics and could lead to hard or permanent errors. The failure of electronic components in a monitoring system could be catastrophic. In addition, the remoteness of the underwater environments makes it even more challenging.
Another layer of complication is added when the telemetry system for the installation, such as pipelines, employ linear sensor networks. Failure of certain sensor nodes could lead to segmentation of the network. The approach has been to ensure the end-to-end reliability of the network at the expense of the reliability of each of the nodes. Therefore, we propose a self-healing and fault-tolerant wireless node for deep-water application.
The node would be designed to recover from hard or permanent errors. At the heart of the system is an Internal Configuration Access Port (ICAP) controller performing task configuration to ensure that any faulty part of the system is dynamically reconfigured.
The objectives of this research are:
- Develop a micro kernel capable of fault tolerance in underwater telemetry system
- Integrate a sensor to the reconfigurable hardware for oil and gas detection
- Perform fault injection and fault detection
- Undertake field tests for shallow and deep water using the prototype
