LTE-Maritime: High-Speed Maritime Wireless Communication Based on LTE Technology

The recent advances in wireless communication technologies allow mobile users to access various data services anytime and anywhere on land, while it is one of challenging issues to provide reliable data communications for maritime users due to the geographic features on the sea. Considering the increasing demands of maritime digital data services, we need to develop maritime communications supporting high-speed data rates and extended communication coverage. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art works related to the data requirements of maritime services and the technical characteristics of existing maritime networks. Then, we introduce a long-term evolution for maritime (LTE-Maritime) that is an ongoing research project in South Korea. The objective of LTE-Maritime is to develop a maritime communication infrastructure supporting the data rates in the order of megabits per second within the communication coverage of 100 km. In order to confirm the feasibility of LTE-Maritime, we implemented a testbed for the LTE-Maritime which consisted of ships equipped with LTE-Maritime routers, base stations (BSs) along the coast, and an operation center. The experimental results show that the LTE-Maritime could be a practical solution for ship-to-shore data communication. Furthermore, we discuss a set of open issues related to the development of LTE-Maritime network.