LTE-Maritime as a Korean e-Navigation Communication Infrastructure

Abstract

Current maritime communication systems have been widely used on very high frequency (VHF), medium frequency (MF), and high frequency (HF) band due to need of coverage. Considering the low data rates of current communication systems, any new communication systems need to be developed for supporting various e-navigation services requiring higher communication performance. In Korea, in order to deal with this issue, a long term evolution maritime (LTE-M) communication system isbeing developed as a part of the SMART-Navigation project. The objective of LTE-M is to apply LTE technology which have been used as terrestrial communication to maritime communication with coverage near 100 km. In this paper, through the field experiments using LTE-M communication built in Korea coast, the performance of the LTE-M system is presented with result analysis. The experimental results show that the implementation of e-Navigation communication infrastructure based on LTE can be feasible with coverage near 100 km.