Fostering marine internet with advanced maritime radio system using spectrums of cellular networks

Abstract

Marine Internet aims at providing Internet service in marine environments for applications on and under water surface. But now only satellite can provide such kind of service, which is expensive and not cost-effectively for ever-increasing human activities in the ocean. Meanwhile, the maritime radio system, which is primarily used by maritime transportation industry for navigation, distress handling as well as rescue and safety operations, also finds difficulties in satisfying ever-increasing demand on communication capacity to realize safe, green and intelligent maritime transport. This is mainly due to the fact that a limited amount of bandwidth is allocated to this system. Different from many proposals available in the literature, which address these two issues separately, this paper discusses an architecture to handle them together by exploiting the spectrums licensed to mobile cellular networks. It is expected to enhance the maritime radio system while fostering the deployment of marine Internet in water areas near coastlines with reduced deployment cost.