GPS-Based Wireless Ad Hoc Network for Marine Monitoring, Search and Rescue (MSnR)

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

“…Similarly, offshore drilling platforms require realtime operational data communications, and buoys also have a large amount of meteorological and hydrological data to upload [4]- [6]. For maritime rescue, in addition to information exchange using texts and voices, real-time videos are often required for better ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore coordination [7]. Therefore, building a broadband maritime communication network (MCN) for the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is of great significance for marine transportation [8] [9], production safety [10] and emergency rescue [11].…”

Maritime Networking: Bringing Internet to the Sea

“…While maritime networks are comparable to MANETs and VANETs (see Section II-C), there are two main distinguishing characteristics, namely dynamic link quality and bandwidth constrained due to the effects of communication over sea surface, and dynamic network topology due to the characteristics of ship traffic (see Section II-E for more description). A maritime network should be distinguished from a distributed wireless sensor network (WSN), comprised of aquatic sensors, drones, or small boats (e.g., fishing boats), that collects sensing outcomes (e.g., ship location which is delay-tolerant information [3]) and forwards them to a nearby gateway or shore station using short-range transmission (e.g., IEEE 802.11 or Wi-Fi) at low antenna height, which are subsequently processed or combined, in surveillance based applications [3]- [5] (see Section II-D). In WSNs, a shore station provides a large transmission range in land-to-sea communication, and so the focus is sea-to-land communication, while in maritime networks, both land-to-sea and sea-to-land communications, a well as delay-intolerant information, are of concern.…”

“…Maritime communication specifications-including those that relate to network operators, wireless equipment, and radio channels-are generally regulated by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Radio Regulation. Currently, simple applications requiring less than 1 Mbps (e.g., emails and web surfing, navigation, emergency response, as well as search and rescue) [3], rather than multimedia communications requiring more data rate (e.g., video call requires 1 Mbps, and file transfer requires 2 Mbps [16]), are supported in maritime communication [6]. Commonly, maritime communication uses two main types of analogue communications.…”

“…(a) low bandwidth (e.g., INMARSAT GAN and INMARSAT BGAN provide data rates of up to 64 kbps and 432 kbps per satellite link, respectively); (b) high propagation delay (typically a round trip time of approximately 600 ms [17]); (c) high packet error rate (typically ranging from 10 −3 to 10 −1 ) [18]; (d) high cost because of the large initial investment on satellite-related equipment (e.g., stabilizers for onboard antennas) [6], satellite launching cost, and data transfer cost (e.g., approximately US$13.75 per minute for a voice service [15] (or 30 times more expensive [19]) and approximately US$300 to US$2000 per month on satellite cost [14]), and so satellite communication is either not installed [3] or used for exchanging a large volume of data, and data can be compressed before transmission [12]; (e) low stability with long duration and high frequency of link breakages; (f) lack of coverage in certain areas, such as fjords, ports, and some polar regions, particularly relatively high latitude areas (e.g., Europe and US) where a small elevation angle can cause frequent link breakages. Secondly, terrestrial line of sight (LOS) radio that provides direct ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications (see Figure 3b).…”

Investigating the Impact of Global Positioning System Evidence

“…While GPS technology is typically an option for mobile devices, it is increasingly being integrated into a variety of other aspects of technology. The capabilities, limitations and overall impact of GPS devices are being investigated in relation to transportation [18,26,29] and surveillance [3,10,11,31]. In addition, researchers are investigating variables that impact, along with solutions to improve, the technical accuracy of GPS devices [5,9,28].…”