Connectivity and route analysis for a maritime communication network

Abstract

We are interested in extending the coverage of a terrestrial wireless communication network to the sea so that cost effective communications can be provided to the ships. The coverage extension can be achieved by using ships as relay nodes for other ships that are further away. This paper studies the feasibility of doing so at the Singapore East Coast. The feasibility is based on having 90% of the nodes connected to the terrestrial network 90% of the times. Using actual ship mobility traces in the area, we confirm that such a network is feasible when transmission range between land station and ship is at least 15 km and transmission range between ships is at least 8 km. For a feasible network, there are always multiple candidate routes between a ship and the land station, and the average path length of the candidate routes is about 1.8. This calls for possible use of multi-path routing protocols, and the short path length implies a potentially acceptable end-to-end delay for real-time traffic.