This paper proposes an opportunistic subchannel allocation (OSA) scheme for relay-based marine communication networks to improve a sum-rate capacity. In most previous works for relay-based networks, each RS delivers the data received from the BS immediately to the corresponding ships in each frame. The achievable data-rate of the two-hop transmission (BS-RS and RS-ship links) is thus limited by the channel quality between BS-RS and RS-ship links. Hence, the radio resources can be wasted according to the difference in the channel quality between the BS-RS link and the RS-ship link. The proposed OSA scheme reduces the waste of radio resources by efficiently and independently allocating the radio resources at the BS-RS link and at the RS-ship link according to the channel quality of each link. The proposed OSA scheme, however, increases the computational complexity, because the BS finds the optimal OFDMA resource by checking the channel quality of all BS-RS links and RS-ship links. The simulation results show that the sum-rate capacity of the proposed OSA scheme improves maximum 14.0% compared with the conventional scheme.

The maritime cognitive radio networks (MCRNs) provide the high throughput with a low communication cost because the secondary ships opportunistically access to unused licensed bands of primary ships. In the ground cognitive radio networks, the busy and idle state of a primary user during a frame is not nearly changed because the state of the primary user are slowly changed. However, the state of the primary ship in the MCRNs may be frequently changed in the frame. Therefore, this paper evaluates the throughput of a primary ship and secondary ships in the MCRNs taking the state change of a primary ship into consideration when the fusion center uses the cooperative spectrum sensing. The simulation results show that trade-off between the throughput of a primary ship and that of secondary ships according to the system parameter such as the cooperative spectrum sensing scheme, the number of secondary ships, and the target detection probability.

As the wireless communication technologies are being studied for application to marine communication networks in a fusion of marine industries and IT technology, this paper proposes a HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme for reliable communication between the smart ships. Moreover, this paper evaluates the performance of the HARQ-ARQ interaction schemes through the computer simulation. In the HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme for marine network systems, as a HARQ acknowledgement is implicitly utilized as an ARQ acknowledgement.Hence, the HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme can reduce the packet delay. However, the HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme has problems caused by the error of HARQ feedback messages. Hence, this paper considers the effect of error of HARQ feedback messages on the performance of the HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme, in marine network systems. The simulation results show that the HARQ-ARQ interaction scheme can improve the delay performance of the ships in the marine network systems.

This paper proposes a coordinated multi-point (CoMP) based dynamic transmission scheme in a downlink multi-ship network, where a central ship selects a ship in order to maximize the utility function. The proposed scheduling scheme dynamically decides to the usage of the coordinated multi transmissions and selects a user to be served for every frame, in order to the utility function on the basis of the throughput and fairness. In particular, the proposed utilify function based scheduling scheme aims to increase the quality of service of ships at the edge of cells. Under the proportional fair scheduling, the simulation results show that the proposed utility function-based scheduling improves the throughput of the ships at the cell edge with the little sacrifice of the system capacity.