Routing Protocol For Maritime Wireless Mesh Networks

The existing maritime communication systems (such as the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System and the Automatic Identification System) mainly communicate through the UHF and VHF. With the low transmission rate, it is hard for them to satisfy the requirements of broadband services for maritime users. Although the maritime satellite system can provide higher transmission bandwidth, it is very expensive. In order to provide a more reliable and visualized transmission channel with more bandwidth to provide a cheap broadband access solution for the ships at sea, it is necessary to investigate the architecture and routing protocol for maritime wireless mesh networks.In this paper, we first analyze the current development status of maritime communication system and summarize the different requirements of maritime users for future maritime communication system. And then, we introduce the structure of wireless mesh networks and the key idea of several classical routing protocol, and compare wireless mesh networks with Ad Hoc networks. Based on this, we discuss the construction of wireless maritime mesh networks, point out the problems and the key factors that affect network performance. In addition, based on the ship sailing data in the literature, we develop a ship movement model for OPNET platform by joint programming of Matlab and OPNET. Furthermore, with a consideration of the propagation characteristics of radio waves on the sea, we introduce the sea surface reflection loss, hull penetration loss and correction coefficient to develop a radio wave propagation model for OPNET platform. Finally, we develop the OPNET simulation platform for wireless maritime mesh networks by introducing the above ship movement model and the sea surface propagation loss model into OPNET. Based on this platform, we compare the performance of AODV, OLSR and DSR by extensive simulations in term of packet delay, throughput and packet delivery ratio. Simulation results show that AODV outperforms the other two protocols.