Case Study for Ship Ad-hoc Networks under a Maritime Channel Model in Coastline Areas

ITU-R M.1842-1, as a well-known specification dedicated to maritime mobile applications, has standardized wireless transmission protocols according to the particular characteristics of a maritime communications scenario. A time division multiple access (TDMA) frame structure, along with modulation schemes to achieve a high data rate, has been described clearly in ITU-R M.1842-1. However, several specification items are still under "to be decided" status, which brings ambiguity to research works. In addition, the current version of ITU-R M.1842-1 is focused mainly on maritime transmissions in open-sea areas, where the cyclic prefix (CP) is set to zero and only 16-QAM is used in the multi-carrier (MC) system. System performance might be dramatically degraded in coastline areas due to the inter-symbol interference (ISI) caused by selective fading. This is because there is a higher probability that the signal will be reflected by obstacles in coastline areas. In this paper, we introduce the transmission resource block (TRB) dedicated to ITU-R M.1842-1 for a ship ad-hoc network (SANET), where the pilot pattern of TRB is based on the terrestrial trunked radio (TETRA). After that, we evaluated SANET performance under the maritime channel model in a coastline area. In order to avoid noise amplification and to overcome the ISI caused by selective fading, several strategies are suggested and compared in the channel estimation and equalization procedures, where the link-level simulation results finally validate our proposals.