Maritime Networking: Bringing Internet to the Sea

Maritime networks establish wireless multi-hop networks to provide wireless broadband service at sea, connecting various kinds of ships, maritime buoys, and beacons. The maritime networks possess two distinguishing characteristics highly affected by maneuver at sea-dynamic link quality and bandwidth constrained, and dynamic network topology-that warrant specific attention. Unlike land vehicles, maneuver at sea is affected by sea surface movement and wave occlusions, which can cause unstable environment with a high rate of link breakages caused by low link stability, as well as low and highly variable bandwidth. In spite of the need to achieve performance close to high-speed terrestrial wireless broadband service on land, there is only a perfunctory effort to investigate maritime networks. There is an urgent need to refresh the interest to investigate, as well as to further enhance, maritime networks. This paper presents a review of the limited research works of this topic, which revolve around the networking issues in the link, network, and upper layers, in the literature. The objective is to establish a foundation in order to motivate a new research interest in maritime networks. Open issues are also presented to foster new research initiatives in this burgeoning and exciting area.