The Application of 5G Wireless Communication in Maritime Environment

Abstract

Recently, 5G wireless communication have been rapidly adopted for maritime applications. As a result, significant progress has been made in the ocean digitalization. 5G features with low latency, high reliability, and a large bandwidth, which satisfies the requirements of maritime applications. Due to significant differences between land and marine radio propagation environments, the maritime communication encounters a large challenge for providing maritime users with reliable data communication service. In order to solve the abovementioned challenge, we designed a maritime 5G terminal and tested it on an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in the Lanyue Lake of Zhejiang Ocean University. The test data were collected, and the corresponding data analysis are presented, which includes signal strength, signal reception quality, upload and download data rate. The received signal level (RSL) and transmission data rate obtained by the maritime 5G terminals demonstrate great potential of meeting the communication requirements of the maritime users. It is also can be found that the RSL and the data transmission rate of the maritime 5G can be used for the remote control of the unmanned ships, with the signal strength at sea up to -89.45 dBm, and maximum rate up to 226 Mbps.