Call for papers — Feature topic, vol. 17, no. 3, 2020

With the rapid development of maritime activities, there has been a growing demand for high data rate and ultra-reliable maritime communications. Traditionally, this is provided by maritime satellites. Besides, shore and island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks providing the fourth-generation (4G) or even the fifth-generation (5G) services. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-aided and ship-borne BSs can also be exploited to serve as relaying nodes in maritime mesh/ad-hoc networks. Despite all these approaches, there are still open issues towards the establishment of an agile maritime communication network (MCN). Different from terrestrial communications for urban or suburban coverage, the MCN faces several challenges due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications. To address all these challenges, conventional communications and networking theories and methods need to be tailored for maritime application scenarios or new ones should be explored.