Design of a Maritime Autoencoder Communication System Based on Attention Mechanisms and DenseBlock

Abstract

As the maritime industry continues to thrive and maritime services diversify, the demand for highly reliable maritime communication systems has become increasingly prominent. However, harsh marine conditions pose significant challenges to communication systems. In this work, we propose a Maritime AutoEncoder (MAE) communication system based on Attention Mechanisms (AMs) and DenseBlock (namely AM-Dense-MAE). AM-Dense-MAE utilizes DenseBlock and long short-term memory to extract deep features and capture spatio-temporal relationships, addressing the issue of “long-term dependency”. Furthermore, the decoder incorporates spatial attention modules and convolutional block attention module to enhance the preservation of crucial information and suppress irrelevant data. We employ the Rician fading channel model to simulate maritime communication channels. A substantial volume of data is utilized for model training and parameter optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that, in comparison to the benchmarks, the proposed AM-Dense-MAE exhibits better block error rate performance under various signal-to-noise ratio conditions and showcases generalization capabilities across diverse parameter settings.