Dynamic Selection Scheme of LTE-M and 5G for Efficient Maritime Communication Based on Traffic Volume

This paper investigates the technology for selecting communication scheme based on the amount of traffic in LTE-M (Marine) and 5G communication environments. Recently, it has been possible to use LTE-M and 5G communications for preventing collisions between ships and obstacles in coastal areas, moving from a focus on terrestrial users. This paper proposes a scheme for efficiently handling both small-scale and large-volume traffic generated from terminals on ships. LTE-M can accommodate more terminals by utilizing the wide coverage of coastal areas, but it can be vulnerable to high-volume video processing for real-time obstacle detection. 5G provides a high data transmission rate and low latency, making it suitable for large data exchanges between ships or real-time services, but its short coverage makes it unsuitable for accommodating a wide area. Therefore, this paper proposes a scheme for dynamically selecting LTE-M or 5G communication schemes according to the amount of data generated by terminals on ships, to transmit data. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to decide which communication scheme, LTE-M or 5G, should be chosen based on the amount and type of traffic. The algorithm dynamically selects the optimal communication scheme considering real-time traffic information and network status. By implementing a simulation environment for coastal areas using the technique proposed in this paper, we compare the scheme where terminals installed on ships selectively use LTE-M and 5G communication schemes with the scheme where two communication schemes are chosen randomly for transmission. The simulation results confirm that the proposed technique can process more data compared to the existing schemes.