Interference-and-Voyage Based Cell Zooming for Maritime Wideband Network

The remarkable growth of the marine economy has made the maritime wideband communication a research focus. This article presents a multiple backhauls based maritime wideband communication (MBC) architecture to provide the wideband access to the ocean vessels. In MBC architecture, the ships equipped with shipborne LTE base stations (BSs) could autonomously choose the maritime satellites or the onshore high-tower BSs as the backhaul nodes. The other ships carrying the shipborne customer premise equipment (CPE) can access the Internet through the shipborne BSs. Furthermore, an interference-and-voyage based cell zooming strategy is proposed to coordinate the inter-cell interference in the MBC architecture. The proposed strategy adjusts the BS cell size based on the BS inter-ference level and ship voyage. Simulation results using the real ship data show that under the MBC architecture, the proposed cell zooming strategy can effectively coordinate the inter-cell interference and increase the throughput of the maritime wideband network.