UNMANNED OCEAN LOGISTICS VESSEL-BASED DISRUPTION-TOLERANT NETWORK

Abstract

Network connectivity is sparse in the marine environment where there is a lack of wireless infrastructure. The mobility of ships, along with fluctuating sea surfaces, makes maintaining end-to-end connectivity between ships highly challenging. As an alternative to costly satellite links, we propose a disruption-tolerant network (DTN) for communications that leverages on unmanned vessels performing logistics operations to concurrently act as nodes to store, carry, and forward messages from ship to ship. In our novel approach, rather than relying on opportunistic contact between vessels while they are performing their logistics operations, the unmanned vessels are directed by our movement models. Finally, we design and simulate various scenarios using the ONE simulator to validate our models.