Another Angle on Standards

Everybody’s Talkin’

We recently sent out a piece on standards, and our participation in US and International Standards Organization (ISO). This has been a long-term OCR priority, because if we don’t have the metric tools to measure the impacts of our acoustical interactions with, and noise impacts on marine life, we won’t be able to understand them.

Over the years – through our membership of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO, we have participated in standards development sessions with rooms full of smart gals and guys who all just want to understand and express metric clarity.

These rooms are populated by scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, and biologists, (and their intellectual spawn), to come up with clear metrics to explain the bio-physical interactions between our various disciplines.

I was alerted about the development of the ISO Standards Committee meeting on “Underwater Internet of Things” (UIoT) at an ANSI bioacoustics meeting in Denver, Colorado. This is acoustically important because unlike wire, fiber, and radio waves that we use in above-water communication environments, radio waves don’t work in salt water, and running wire or fiber in the ocean is really impractical.

Sound, on the other hand, can transmit thousands of kilometers (depending on frequency and energy). But regardless of frequency, it is bound to be in the auditory range of some marine animal or other.

And herein raises our concern. And as we industrialize the ocean – deploying remote control of Autonomous Underwater and Remotely Operated Vessels (AUVs and ROVs), providing Geophysical Positioning Systems (GPS) to these, and controlling and monitoring stationary equipment – all of these tasks will be under the rubric of the “Underwater Internet of Things.”

Enter the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). IEC is a governing body that intends to harmonize international standards with manufacture’s priorities. So outside of the simple need to align metrics and vocabulary, IEC members have an incentive to advance standards that presuppose their established and developing industrial technologies.

And unlike the ISO, which is seeking clarity, the IEC is populated by manufacturers who are seeking advantage. And what better way to gain advantage than to craft an “International Standard” that directly dovetails into the technology you are developing?

We were in an ISO/IEC collaborative standards development conference last week, and the climate was decidedly different than our congenial ISO meetings. The IEC was advancing a layered architecture that mirrored the communications architecture of the early1990s – when wire, radio frequency (RF), and eventually fiber transmitted data. Timing schemes were the key issue (anyone remember “Token Ring” protocol?).

One of the dominant characteristics of these architectures is broadcasting a continuous data stream – making sure that all nodes in a network are in contact and accounted for. In wire, fiber, and RF transmission, this is biologically (relatively) benign, because with the exception of RF energy, none of the signals impinge on biological systems.

But in the ocean, where sound would be the dominant communication channel, having a zillion continuous transmission sources is a really crappy idea. Particularly when the most useful frequencies (adjusted for range and baud rate) would be between 10 – 30kHz – the “sweet spot” for dolphins and porpoises, their fish prey, and perhaps barnacles, krill, and amphipods.

We ISO “Technical Committee 43, Sub Committee 41Working Group 7,” (TC43/SC41/WG7) needed to stall the advancement of the UIoT standards until we had submitted a risk analysis on what is called “The Physical Layer” – what used to be the benign wire and RF transmission channels but will mostly be acoustics in the UIoT.

We managed to halt the approval of the standard by some procedural legerdemain. Now our work is in front of us: we need to publish a biological risk analysis document substantiated by published papers. And for my role, come up with some UIoT options that will be more benign; incorporating the most current communications protocols that don’t depend on continuous sound transmission.