船間無線LANを用いた小型船舶対象の安心ネットワーク構築

Abstract

Recently, an increase in small craft sea accidents has been reported and a lack of experience of crews on the small craft obstructs quickly reacting to an accident. Thus, it becomes more important to tighten safety measures for the navigation of the small craft. If such small crafts have the equipment for common communication with base stations on land or with other crafts, it will be great support for the crew. This paper proposes the common communication method using wireless LAN system to safety support to navigating of the small craft. We investigate the effectiveness of the wireless communications using the proposed network constructed on the Seto Inland Sea. In particular, we evaluate a network quality between two ships by three approach situations: on the same course, crossing, and meeting, and by two antennas. The kinds of the gain of antenna are each 3dBi and 6dBi. The experiment shows that the network quality affects the distance between two ships rather than the kinds of courses, and we obtain enough network quality on the sea. Thus, it is possible to build applications which support to navigate small craft safely by the use of the communication band width obtained by these experiments.