The development of a visualization framework for fishing vessels at sea

Security and disaster alert dissemination showcase the key challenges faced by the fishing industry, mainly due to the lack of reliable communication means, and can pose serious threats to the lives of the fishermen. The fishing vessels, equipped with appropriate transceivers, can be considered as MANETs (Mobile Ad-hoc Networks) at sea, and communication can happen in a hop by hop manner. The availability of a visualization framework for such a system enables authorities on the shore to get information on vessel locations, their transmission ranges, and other information, in near real-time, and display them. The visualization framework will aid in selecting the most favorable routing algorithm and will help to track and locate the vessels. The system is designed to enable the users to access it through a web browser, and is developed using the latest web technologies such as HTML5, websockets and Google Maps API V3. The system architecture, implementation details and the results obtained are discussed in this paper.