A Network Selection Scheme Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process for Marine Internet

Abstract

The marine Internet technology has been proposed to exploit abundant communication and network resources available in the ocean in order to provide more cost-effective and handy network services therein. Basically, the marine Internet architecture is based on heterogeneous large-scale dynamic wireless, which consists of different types of networks such as satellite networks, coastline networks, and ship ad-hoc networks etc. These networks are different in terms of networking cost, capacity, and performance as well as availability and reliability. This imposes challenges for network selection, especially when there is no guarantee on the availability and reliability of network resources in oceans, which is different from network selection in terrestrial environments. Thus, this paper studies a network selection scheme by jointly considering the above uncertainty of network resources based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for marine Internet. The proposed scheme is evaluated through a simulation study on the EXata platform, in comparison with the Simple Additive Weighting and the Multiplicative Exponent Weighting schemes. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme yield better performance.