Lanepost: lane-based optimal routing protocol for delay-tolerant maritime networks

Ship-to-ship, ship-to-shore radio links empowered by WiFi, WiMAX etc have been recently exploited to build maritime multi-hop mesh networks to provide internet services to on-ship users. However, because of the mobility of the vessels/ships and the large inter-ship distances, nodes in the maritime network are frequently disconnected, forcing data communication in the maritime mesh networks to be opportunistic and delay-tolerant. In this paper, we present LanePost, an optimization approach for maritime delay-tolerant routing protocol. We exploit the shipping lane information to predict the rendezvous opportunities of the ships to optimize the route selection in delay-tolerant routing. In particular, we show that when the shipping lane information is available, an opportunistic routing graph (ORG) for each ship can be constructed to predict its multi-hop data routing opportunities to the other ships or to the shore. Based on the ORG, we develop an optimal route protocol (i.e., LanePost) for each ship to minimize its delay of multi-hop packet delivery via dynamic programming. We discussed the ways of collecting shipping lane information by centralized method or distributed method. The proposed LanePost protocol was evaluated by ONE, an open-source delay-tolerant network simulator, which shows its dramatic performance improvement in terms of delay reduction compared to the state-of-the-art opportunistic routing protocols.