No reading left behind.
The Mesh Data Fabric is the bloodstream of AERIEL — a self-healing transport that carries every byte from 250+ AquaLink nodes and the dark-running fleet to NEREID, and returns command back to the water. Strands fail; the record does not.
Mesh Data Fabric
The redundant, no-single-point-of-failure data backbone that links the AquaLink Mesh and the fleet network to NEREID. Figures below stream live from the fabric.
1. Overview
The fabric imitates a tide-pool network: many redundant channels, no central hub, and traffic that re-routes around damage before a watchstander sees a gap. It transports the output of the Sensing Array and the chemistry mesh inbound to NEREID, and delivers metered control — pumps, dosing, chiller setpoints, containment interlocks — back outbound to actuators, all under deterministic latency guarantees. Every packet is timestamped, signed, and replayable.
2. Topology
Three logical planes over a partial-mesh physical fabric:
- Edge plane — AquaLink gateways at each station boundary aggregate low-power sensor-mesh traffic (802.15.4 / sub-GHz acoustic-modem uplink) onto the fabric.
- Transport plane — redundant subsea/fiber + line-of-sight RF strands in a partial mesh; every gateway holds ≥ 3 link-disjoint paths to a core.
- Core plane — two physically separated core clusters (Breeding Station Hub · Reservoir Vault) running active-active; NEREID and the archive attach here.
No node is more than 4 transport hops from a core. Design rule: survive any single core, any two strands, or any one gateway without a latency-budget breach.
3. Architecture & Transport Stack
| Layer | Mechanism | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Transport | QUIC over UDP, 0-RTT resumption | Low-latency streaming, head-of-line avoidance on lossy RF |
| Messaging | TIDE pub/sub (topic = station/zone/channel) | Fan-out telemetry to NEREID, command wall, archive |
| Routing | Current-weighted shortest-path, congestion-aware | Self-healing path selection around failed strands |
| Encoding | CBOR + zstd | Compact, schema-evolvable telemetry frames |
| Time | PTP IEEE 1588v2 + GNSS-disciplined grandmaster | Sub-µs alignment for cross-node voting & evidence |
| Buffering | Per-node FRAM store-and-forward ring | Continuity through comms blackout (see §5) |
4. Data Rates & Latency Budgets
| Class | Example Traffic | Latency Budget (p95) | Loss | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Control (C0) | Containment interlock, chiller / dosing command | < 8 ms | 0 (acked) | Strict-high, preemptive |
| Alarm (C1) | CRITICAL / containment events, man-overboard | < 15 ms | 0 (acked) | High |
| Telemetry (C2) | AquaLink chemistry & Sensing Array streams | < 40 ms | < 1e-5 | Assured |
| Bulk (C3) | Hyperspectral photomosaics, hydrophone archives, backups | < 2 s | best-effort | Scavenger |
5. Self-Healing & Edge Buffering
The fabric is built for the dark. Gyre stations ride out days of satellite blackout; interdiction hulls run silent for the duration of a shadow. Neither loses a single reading.
Sub-250 ms Failover
Failed strands decay to zero weight within 250 ms; C0/C1 traffic rides pre-installed backup paths with no recompute on failure.
Edge Buffering
Each node logs to a 96 h FRAM ring during blackout. On link return it backfills in timestamp order behind live traffic — gapless and in sequence.
Core Survival
Loss of one core sheds zero traffic; QUIC connection-ID migration moves live sessions to the surviving core without re-handshake.
- Gyre stations buffer up to 96 h of full-cadence telemetry; a 4-day blackout replays in under 8 minutes once the satellite window opens.
- Dark-running hulls cache locally and burst-sync on surfacing or relay handoff; chain-of-custody is preserved by per-frame signatures.
- Backfilled data is flagged
replayedin NEREID so trends and evidence carry their true acquisition time, not arrival time.
6. Integrity & Evidence-Grade Signing
AERIEL telemetry is not only operational — it is testimony. Detections feed interdiction cases and tribunal filings, so the chain of custody begins at the sensor.
- In transit: TLS 1.3 / QUIC with mutual cert auth; every sensor frame is additionally Ed25519-signed at the node before it touches the fabric.
- At rest: AES-256-GCM, per-tier keys, 90-day rotation via the station HSM.
- Integrity: an append-only, hash-chained audit log records every control command and every evidence frame — tamper-evident end to end.
- Access: zero-trust scoped tokens; Abyssal Holding (restricted) streams require TIDEWATER-tier authorization to read.
7. Integration with NEREID
The fabric carries; NEREID decides. NEREID subscribes to TIDE topics for live streams and reads the warm tier for anomaly-training windows. Its decisions return as C0 control frames the fabric prioritizes under the 8 ms budget, and its alarms route per Alarm Escalation (AE-MON-0040). Sensor provenance and modality detail are specified in the Sensing Array (AE-MON-0030).