Joint Multicast Beamforming and Relay Design for Maritime Communication Systems

Abstract

With growing human maritime activities, supporting low-cost and high-speed information services for users at sea has become imperative. However, traditional means of maritime communications fail to provide high rate services due to their high cost and limited bandwidth. In this paper, considering a base station ashore and several offshore relay nodes, we propose a cooperative multicast communication scheme for maritime users relying on joint beamforming (BF) optimization and relay design. Specifically, we decompose our proposed joint optimization problem into two subproblems, which can be solved by the feasible point pursuit successive convex approximation approach. Furthermore, an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed, which imposes an exponentially increasing complexity as a function of the number of BF elements and the number of relays, when aiming for finding the globally optimal solution. In order to reduce this excessive computational complexity, a low-complexity distributed algorithm is also conceived and its closed-form solution is derived. Finally, the simulation results provided show that our proposed algorithm is beneficial in terms of increasing both the throughput as well as the energy efficiency.

Maritime Communications: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

“…Because of the complexity and high computation of the calculation in [97], the authors also investigated the same problem, but this time by taking the ITU marine path-loss [99] with 10% time as a reference model [100]. In [101], the authors proposed to use MIMO antennas with a coastal two-hop relaying system to manage and communicate with users and boats in the offshore region. Although the boats in the offshore area are few, they may be grouped into many clusters consisting of multiple vessels close together.…”

Maritime Communications: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

“…Because of the complexity high computation of the calculation in [95], the authors also investigate the same problem, but this time with taking the ITU marine path-loss [97] with 10% time as a reference model [98]. In [99], the authors proposed to use MIMO antennas with a coastal two-hop relaying system to manage and communicate with users and boats in the offshore region. Although the boats in the offshore region are few, they may be grouped into many clusters consisting of multiple vessels close together.…”

An Overview on Multiway Relay Communications: Fundamental Issues, Recent Advances, and New Challenges

“…However, the corresponding communication cost is extremely high, and the maritime communication system depending on VHT communications cannot provide mobile multimedia services due to its limited bandwidth. Therefore, more attentions have been focused on the exploration of applying terrestrial communication techniques to maritime communications in order to supply low-cost and high data-rate mobile services [24] [25]. Due to their ability of extending wireless network coverage area and improving spatial cooperation diversity, relay communications, a widely used terrestrial communication technique, has been migrated to the ocean scenario for supporting efficient and reliable information services.…”