Abstract
Maritime communications are really challenging due to the adverse transmission conditions and the lack of a pre-provided infrastructure for supporting long range connectivity with land. Communications in high seas are usually covered by satellite links that are expensive and lead to high power consumption by the terminals. However, in areas closer to the shore, other communication options have been adopted for different kinds of services such as boat tracking and telemetry, data collection from moored monitoring systems, etc. In these scenarios, technologies such as cellular communications or wireless sensor networks have been employed so far; nevertheless, all of them present different drawbacks mostly related with the coverage and energy-efficiency of the system. Recently, a novel communication paradigm, so-called Low Power-Wide Area Network (LP-WAN) has gained momentum due to its interesting characteristics regarding transmission distances and end-node’s power consumption. The latter may be of great interest for ships with energetic restrictions such as small sailboats, recreational boats, or radio control ships. For that reason, in this work, we present a boat tracking and monitoring system based on LoRa (Long Range), one of the most prominent LP-WAN technologies. We provide a comprehensive overview of this communication solution as well as a discussion addressing its benefits when applied to maritime scenarios. We present the results extracted from a case of study, where real-training sessions of Optimist Class sailboats have been monitored by means of the presented architecture, obtaining good levels of coverage and link-reliability with limited power consumption. A transmission range study is also presented, demonstrating the validity of this proposal for monitoring activities inside the port or maneuvers close to the shore.
Highlights
Enabling maritime communications have been a big challenge since their origins [1]
The results showed that, in some scenarios, a boat chain can be established for transporting information from a far node to the gateway on land in a multi-hop fashion, but, in other cases, some boats are isolated with no communication capabilities
Maritime communications may take advantage of the state-of-the-art communication technologies that are emerging under the umbrella of the internet of things (IoT) paradigm
Summary
Enabling maritime communications have been a big challenge since their origins [1]. radio transmission technologies have rapidly evolved during the last times, e.g., WiFi, 4G, WiMAX, etc., maritime scenarios still present particular characteristics that notably make more difficult the deployment of reliable and widely adopted communication systems. As some of those previously cited, perfectly match the main IoT systems precepts: (i) need for long range transmissions; (ii) reduced use of bandwidth per message; (iii) limited number of messages per node per day; (iv) big number of simultaneously connected end-devices, and (v) low-cost end-devices All these characteristics are satisfied by the wide plethora of LP-WAN-based platforms; among all of them, LoRa (Long Range) [11] is one of the most prominent so it is receiving great attention by the research community [10,12]. The main contributions of this work are the following: (i) a deep discussion of LP-WAN and its applicability to maritime scenarios; (ii) an experimental equipment for monitoring both oceanic and boat parameters; and (iii) the validation of a real deployment by which the monitoring of sailboat activities through the Internet is enabled.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
