• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.521-528
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• 2008

Such conventional maritime communication technologies as radio have short some comings in their transmission quality. It can be overcome by wireless channels provided by satellites such as INMARSAT, which nevertheless suffer from the high costs. In this paper, we propose a novel technology resolving the above problems, featuring in the establishment of maritime communication networks with multi-hop structures. The inter vessel and ship-to- shore networks previously modeled after MANET are remodeled by SANET (Ship Ad Hoc Networks) in the present work. Fan-shaped Search Zone Routing (FSR) protocol also is presented, which utilizes not only static geographical information including the locations of ports and the navigations of courses but also the unique characteristics of ships in terms of mobile nodes. The FSR finds the fan-shaped search zone on which the shortest path is located. The performance of LAR protocol is compared with that of FSR in several ways. First, FSR does not make use of a type of control packets as beaconing data, resulting in a full utilization of the bandwidth of the wireless channels. Second, the delivery rate by the FSR is 100% for the fan-shaped search zone includes at least one route between source and destination nodes on its border line, where as that of LAR has been turned out to be 64%. Third, the optimality of routes searched by the FSR is on a 97% level. Of all, the FSR shows a better performance than LAR by about 50%.