The fifth UComms conference call for paper submission portal is now open!

Interoperability is increasingly at the center of the discussion of underwater communications. Over the last five years, the maritime research community has seen great strides in digital underwater communication technology such as the release of the watermark channel simulator by the Norwegian Research Establishment FFI in 2016, an invaluable software tool that allows researchers to assess standardized protocol performance. Later in 2017, JANUS, developed by CMRE in collaboration with NATO Nations, became the first digital underwater communications protocol and was adopted as a NATO standard. Both JANUS and the watermark channel simulator are incredible achievements of the UComms community.

Sponsored by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Oceanic Engineering Society (OES), Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Atlas Elektronik, UComms actively engages the underwater communications community including researchers, engineers, academics, equipment designers, manufacturers and users. The mission of the conference series is to understand of the propagation of underwater communication signals and the performance of higher layer protocols. The objective of UComms is to foster network-wide standards as a foundation for interoperability.

UComms’20 welcomes scientists and engineers involved in research, development, implementation and use of underwater communication systems. The conference topics cover the full range of interests from physical understanding of the communication channels (acoustic optical, radio) to network protocols and experimentation.

Some central topics for 2020 are:

• Machine-learning for adaptive underwater communications
• Non-acoustic underwater communications
• Underwater localization
• Deterministic and statistical methods for acoustic propagation modeling for underwater acoustic communications
• New applications enabled by next-generation underwater acoustic communications
• Channel-aware security
• Next-generation adaptive modem architectures and cognitive networking strategies
• Interoperability and standards

Students are encouraged to attend UComms and take part in the discussions and networking.

For more information and to submit a paper, please visit: http://www.ucomms.net. The submission deadline is March 16^th.

UComms'18 conference photo in Lerici.