Due to the increasing number of undersea cable disruptions that have occurred over the past few years, NATO is establishing a system that will locate damage to undersea cables with one-meter accuracy and find more routes that data can take if a disruption occurs. line. The project will be called HEIST, IEEE In one report, the report stands for “Hybrid Space-Submarine Architecture for Securing Telecommunications Information.”
The value of transactions transmitted via submarine cables totals more than $10 trillion, said Henric Johnson, vice-chancellor of Blenkinge Institute of Technology (BTH) and coordinator of the HEIST testbed: “We are now talking about submarine cables as a critical infrastructure for society.” BTH, located in Karlskrona near Sweden’s southern coast, is one of the partners of the HEIST programme. There, engineers will develop smart systems to quickly locate cable breaks and protocols to quickly and automatically reroute affected data to satellites.
“We have had cables damaged between Sweden, Estonia and Finland,” Johnson added. “So these events are a reality for us.”
Although undersea cables may appear to be solid infrastructure due to the environment in which they are located, these intercontinental connections are extremely fragile. This is because these cables are about the thickness of a garden hose and sit on the ocean floor rather than being buried in it. Any object dragging along the ocean floor (marine life, a loose anchor, or a submarine) can easily damage or even cut these communication cables.
This shows how fragile our internet-driven world is, especially considering that more than 95% of global data traffic travels through these undersea optical fibers. There are about 100 cable cuts every year, and there are about 600 submarine cables around the world, which means about 16% of global connections are disrupted every year. Although there are ships around the world designed to repair a malfunction immediately after it occurs, this often takes days or weeks and can cost millions of dollars.
Satellites are the primary backup to undersea cables, but their bandwidth lags far behind physical connections. For example, GoogleThe latest fiber optic lines can reach 340 terabits per second. By comparison, the frequencies used by most satellites (12 to 18GHz) can only handle about 5 gigabytes per second, or about 0.0015% of the maximum throughput of Google Fiber’s connection.
Work is currently underway to upgrade the satellite from radio transmission to laser transmission, increasing speeds by about 40 times to 200 Gbps. Starlink already uses this technology to communicate between its satellites, and Amazon I am also developing it for my own Project Kuiper. However, it still faces challenges such as poor visibility between satellites and ground stations and poor targeting accuracy.
Since this is a major project for NATO, the alliance plans to open source parts of the process. Making it public allows anyone interested to find bugs and run multiple iterations. Gregory Falco, HEIST’s NATO national director, believes this is the fastest way for the program to achieve its goals and help prevent catastrophic data transmission losses in the event of a deliberate attack on these underwater infrastructures in international waters.