Quality of Service Provisions for Maritime Communications Based on Cellular Networks

TLDR

Marine users’ growing communication demands and larger coverage needs make applying terrestrial wireless techniques challenging, requiring new solutions. The study proposes a user‑centric distributed‑antenna architecture with an antenna‑selection scheme that creates a virtual service cloud to meet marine users’ QoS. The authors model coastal cellular networks mathematically, derive closed‑form performance expressions, and discuss the prerequisites for the antenna‑selection scheme. Simulations confirm that the proposed architecture and antenna‑selection scheme reliably meet marine users’ QoS across various scenarios.

Abstract

Considering the increase of communication requirements from marine users, more studies try to introduce terrestrial wireless communication techniques into maritime communications to improve communication qualities. However, different communication scenarios introduce challenges for the application of terrestrial techniques to maritime networks. Furthermore, the communication coverage requirement is much larger than that of terrestrial networks, while the quality of service (QoS) requirement of marine users is expected to be like that on land, which makes network design more complicated. To address these problems, a user-centric communication architecture based on distributed antennas is proposed for maritime communications. The scenario of coastal networks based on cellular techniques is modeled mathematically, based on which the performance of such a network is analyzed and closed-form expressions of network performance are presented. To guarantee the QoS requirements of users, an antenna selection scheme is proposed, which can form a virtual service cloud for a targeted user. In addition, the precondition of the antenna selection scheme is discussed. Simulation results verify the analyses and indicate that the proposed scheme can guarantee the QoS of marine users under different cases.