Novel Maritime Wireless Communication based on Mobile Technology for the Safety of Navigation: LTE-Maritime focusing on the Cell Planning and its Verification

Abstract

Enhancing the performance of maritime wireless communication has been highlighted by the issue of cell planning in the sea area because of lack of an appropriate Propagation Loss Model (PLM). To resolve the cell planning issue in vast sea areas, it was essential to develop the (PLM) matching the intended sea area. However, there were considerable gaps between the prediction of legacy PLMs and field measurement in propagation loss and there was a need to develop the adjusted PLM (A-PLM). Therefore, cell planning was performed on this adjusted model, including modification of the base station’s location, altitude, and antenna azimuth to meet the quality objectives. Furthermore, in order to verify the availability of the cell planning, Communication Service Quality Monitoring System (CS-QMS) was developed in the LTE-Maritime project to collect LTE signal quality information from the onboard equipment at regular intervals and to ensure that the service quality was high enough to satisfy the goals in each designated grid. As a result of verification, the success rate of RSRP was 95.7% for the intensive management zone (IMZ) and 96.4% for the interested zone (IZ), respectively.