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

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed

Future broadband access network challenges

Copyright @ 2010 IEEEThe optical and wireless communication systems convergence will activate the potential capacity of photonic technology for providing the expected growth in interactive video, voice communication and data traffic services that are cost effective and a green communication service. The last decade growth of the broadband internet projects the number of active users will grow to over 2 billion globally by the end of 2014. Enabling the abandoned capacity of photonic signal processing is the promising solution for seamless transportation of the future consumer traffic demand. In this paper, the future traffic growth of the internet, wireless worldwide subscribers, and the end-users during the last and next decades is investigated. The challenges of the traditional access networks and Radio over Fiber solution are presented

Modeling of Packet Streaming Services in Information Communication Networks

Application of the term video streaming in contemporary usage denotes compression techniques and data buffering, which can transmit video in real time over the network. There is currently a rapid growth and development of technologies using wireless broadband technology as a transport, which is a seri- ous alternative to cellular communication systems. Adverse effect of the aggressive environment used in wireless networks transmission results in data packets undergoing serious distortions and often get- ting lost in transit. All existing research in this area investigate the known types of errors separately. At present there are no standard approaches to determining the effect of errors on transmission quality of services. Besides, the spate in popularity of multimedia applications has led to the need for optimization of bandwidth allocation and usage in telecommunication networks. Modern telecommunication networks should by their definition be able to maintain the quality of different applications with different Quality of Service (QoS) levels. QoS requirements are generally dependent on the parameters of network and application layers of the OSI model. At the application layer QoS depends on factors such as resolution, bit rate, frame rate, video type, audio codecs, and so on. At the network layer, distortions (such as delay, jitter, packet loss, etc.) are introduced

Characterizing and Improving the Reliability of Broadband Internet Access

In this paper, we empirically demonstrate the growing importance of reliability by measuring its effect on user behavior. We present an approach for broadband reliability characterization using data collected by many emerging national initiatives to study broadband and apply it to the data gathered by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America project. Motivated by our findings, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a practical approach for improving the reliability of broadband Internet access with multihoming.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, 6 table

Insights in the cost of continuous broadband Internet on trains for multi-service deployments by multiple actors with resource sharing

The economic viability of broadband Internet services on trains has always been proved difficult, mainly due to a high investment cost and low willingness to pay by train passengers, but also due to unused opportunities such as non-passenger services (e.g. train performance monitoring, crew services) and optimization of the resources consumed to offer Internet services. Evaluating opportunities to improve the return on investment is therefore essential towards profitability of the business case. By efficiently sharing resources amongst services, costs can be pooled over several services in order to reduce the investment cost per service. Current techno-economic evaluation models are hard to apply to cost allocation in a multi-service deployment with multiple actors and resource sharing. We therefore propose a new evaluation model and apply it to a deployment of Internet services on trains. We start with a detailed analysis of the technical architecture required to provide Internet access on trains. For each component, we investigate the impact by the different services on resource consumption. The proposed techno-economic evaluation model is then applied in order to calculate the total cost and allocate the used and unused resources to the appropriate services. In a final step, we calculate the business case for each stakeholder involved in the offering of these services. This paper details the proposed model and reports on our findings for a multi-service deployment by multiple actors. Results show important benefits for the case that considers the application of resource sharing in a multi-service, multi-actor scenario and the proposed model produces insights in the contributors to the cost per service and the unused amount of a resource. In addition, ex-ante insights in the cost flows per involved actor are obtained and the model can easily be extended to include revenue flows to evaluate the profitability per actor. As a consequence, the proposed model should be considered to support and stimulate upcoming multi-actor investment decisions for Internet-based multi-service offerings on-board trains with resource sharing

Techno-economic viability of integrating satellite communication in 4G networks to bridge the broadband digital divide

Bridging the broadband digital divide between urban and rural areas in Europe is one of the main targets of the Digital Agenda for Europe. Though many technological options are proposed in literature, satellite communication has been identified as the only possible solution for the most rural areas, due to its global coverage. However, deploying an end-to-end satellite solution might, in some cases, not be cost-effective. The aim of this study is to give insights into the economic effectiveness of integrating satellite communications into 4G networks in order to connect the most rural areas (also referred to as white areas) in Europe. To this end, this paper proposes a converged solution that combines satellite communication as a backhaul network with 4G as a fronthaul network to bring enhanced broadband connectivity to European rural areas, along with a techno-economic model to analyse the economic viability of this integration. The model is based on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for 5 years, taking into account both capital and operational expenditures, and aims to calculate the TCO as well as the Average Cost Per User (ACPU) for the studied scenarios. We evaluate the suggested model by simulating a hypothetical use case for two scenarios. The first scenario is based on a radio access network connecting to the 4G core network via a satellite link. Results for this scenario show high operational costs. In order to reduce these costs, we propose a second scenario, consisting of caching the popular content on the edge to reduce the traffic carried over the satellite link. This scenario demonstrates a significant operational cost decrease (more than 60%), which also means a significant ACPU decrease. We evaluate the robustness of the results by simulating for a range of population densities, hereby also providing an indication of the economic viability of our proposed solution across a wider range of areas

UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication

The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS) communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article, first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU). Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE (DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN) layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link, and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,