An Integrated Wireless Communication Architecture for Maritime Sector

The rapid evolution of terrestrial wireless systems has brought mobile users more and more desired communication services. Maritime customers are asking for the same, such as the concepts of "Broadband at Sea" and "Maritime Internet". Quite a lot of research work has focused on the development of new and better maritime communication technologies, but less attention has been paid on interworking of multiple maritime wireless networks or on satisfying service provisioning. To address this, an integrated wireless Communication Architecture for Maritime Sector (CAMS) has been introduced in this article. CAMS is aimed at 1) granting maritime customers uninterrupted connectivity through the best available network and 2) providing them with the best-provisioned communication services in terms of mobility, security and Quality of Experience (QoE). To address mobility challenge, the IEEE 802.21 standard is recommended to be used in CAMS in order to achieve seamless handover. CAMS provides application-level QoE support attending to the limited communication resources (e.g. bandwidth) at sea. Certain security considerations have also been proposed to supplement this architecture.