Internet of Ships: A Survey on Architectures, Emerging Applications, and Challenges

TLDR

The Internet‑of‑Ships (IoS) extends IoT to maritime, creating a network of smart devices and infrastructure to enhance safety, efficiency, and sustainability in shipping. This survey aims to comprehensively review the IoS paradigm, its architecture, key elements, and main characteristics. The authors review state‑of‑the‑art emerging applications such as safety, route planning, collaborative decision‑making, fault detection, cargo tracking, environmental monitoring, energy efficiency, and automatic berthing. They identify open challenges and future research opportunities in satellite communications, security, privacy, data collection, management, and analytics, outlining a roadmap toward optimized maritime operations and autonomous shipping.

Abstract

The recent emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies in mission-critical applications in the maritime industry has led to the introduction of the Internet-of-Ships (IoS) paradigm. IoS is a novel application domain of IoT that refers to the network of smart interconnected maritime objects, which can be any physical device or infrastructure associated with a ship, a port, or the transportation itself, with the goal of significantly boosting the shipping industry toward improved safety, efficiency, and environmental sustainability. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of the IoS paradigm, its architecture, its key elements, and its main characteristics. Furthermore, we review the state of the art for its emerging applications, including safety enhancements, route planning and optimization, collaborative decision making, automatic fault detection and preemptive maintenance, cargo tracking, environmental monitoring, energy-efficient operations, and automatic berthing. Finally, the presented open challenges and future opportunities for research in the areas of satellite communications, security, privacy, maritime data collection, data management, and analytics, provide a road map toward optimized maritime operations and autonomous shipping.