• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.32 no.5
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• pp.775-784
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• 2008

It is not easy to access very high speed Internet services at sea due to some technical and economical problems. In order to realize the very high speed Internet services at sea like on land, new communication network models based on MANET should be adopted. In this paper, a new MANET model at sea is provided, which considered the ocean environments, and the characteristics and movement of vessels. On the basis of the fact that most vessels navigate on the predetermined courses, which are the shortest paths between source and destination ports in most cases, a type of location oriented routing protocol is proposed in this paper. The Hybrid Course-Based Routing Protocol(HCBR) makes use of the static information such as courses and positions of ports to proactively find the shortest paths not only among ports but also the cross points of courses. HCBR also makes use of the locational information of vessels obtained via GPS and AIS systems to reactively discover the shortest route by which data packets are delivered between them. We have simulated the comparison of the performance of HCBR with those of LAR scheme 1 and scheme2, the most typical protocols using geographical information. The simulation results show that HCBR guarantees the route discovery even without using any control packet. They also show that HCBR is more reliable(40%) and is able to obtain more optimal routes(10%) than LAR scheme1 and scheme2 protocols.