Towards Maximizing Throughput and Coverage of a Novel Heterogeneous Maritime Communication Network

Marine fishermen are unable to economically communicate either with other boats over the ocean or with the people on the shore due to the shortcomings in the available cellular and satellite communication. Project OceanNet bridges this gap to deploy a heterogeneous wireless communication system to provide internet access to the fishermen's smart phones in the boat helping them to reach out for help in critical situations. This work involves designing a wireless multi-hop backhaul network to extend the coverage and to improve the connectivity through an ad hoc mesh network between the access routers in different boats. Selecting the best path from the fishermen's end devices in the heterogeneous network can increase the throughput. The design and implementation of an elimination algorithm is dicussed to spectacle the improvement of the throughput and coverage. The algorithm is based on the analysis of the quality of various types of links using Signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) and Expected Transmission Count(ETX) metrics. The performance analysis in hardware test bed prove that the packet delivery ratio is substantially improved by the proposed path selection algorithm in the network.