Real-Time Communication Support for Over-water Wireless Multi-hop Networks

https://www.bsc.es/education/predoctoral-phd/doctoral-symposium/7th-bsc-so-doctoral-symposiumThe prospect scenario for wireless communications and networking technologies in aquatic environments is nowadays promising. The growing interest around this subject in the last decades has recently been accelerated due to the more powerful capabilities of a number of sensing, control and communication devices. Moored, fixed, drifting, and vehicular nodes form now a rich ecosystem of autonomous embedded systems potentially connected in a multi-hop (and over-water) fashion, which demand innovative solutions to satisfy the ever-increasing requirements of reliability, bandwidth, latency and cost. The efforts in this direction, mostly as a result of the push from the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) and related communication paradigms, are now at an early stage, and thus still pose significant, technical and research challenges, especially from the perspective of communication and networking for applications involving real-time and/or multimedia networking traffic. In this research, we focus on the communication and networking aspects of over-water multi-hop networks aiming at support real-time and/or multimedia (audio/video) traffic using IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) commodity technologies. Special attention is devoted to the impact of cyclic water-level variations (such as tides and waves) on the overall network performance, and how an integrated approach to (i) network design, (ii) protocol adaptation and (iii) routing can contribute to mitigating such an issue.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Experimental measurements of propagation characteristics for maritime radio links

International audienceThis paper presents studies, carried out by Télécom Bretagne, concerning new radio technologies (mainly WiMAX, 802.16e) in the maritime environment. The aim of these studies is to reinforce the quality and the robustness of such transmissions. Several measurements were set up to characterize the propagation channel in maritime environment in order to study the communication performances of WiMAX. This characterization was obtained by specific experimental devices, developed and implemented by Télécom Bretagne. The experimentations were carried out at frequencies of 3.5 GHz (Licensed WiMAX Band in France) and 5.8 GHz (Free Band in France). Similar studies [1] and [2] were already carried out, but they did not take into account all the environment characteristics, namely tides and coast relief masking. Our study looks at these parameters for a better understanding of the propagation in operational transmission environments. In this paper, measurements were carried out by measuring the mean received power both for several distances over the sea and for a coastal point-to-point link during long periods. Part of the work presented in this paper has been obtained during the Ex’treme projec

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

Wi-Fi Long Distance Maritime Communications Data Analytics

Nowadays, wireless communications are becoming more and more important to the development of the society, not only in land, but also in the sea. When discussing about communications in maritime environments the scenario is different and harder, because of several factors, such as, the movement on the surface of the sea, the characteristics of the radio propagation and the possible intermittent obstruction that decrease the efficiency of signal propagation. Plenty of wireless communications solutions are already used in maritime environment, such as HF/VHF, which doesn't support high rates; satellite communications, which is an expensive technology and not affordable by most of users; and mobile communications (GSM, 3G and LTE), that only ensure connection near the coast. The main purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to the characterization of the propagation channel and the problems associated with the use of Wi-Fi technology for different frequencies in this kind of environment