Two-state routing protocol for maritime multi-hop wireless networks

•The path loss model close to real channel model for maritime communication is considered.•A novel MTS routing protocol for a multi-hop ship network is proposed.•Proposed MTS provides efficient and reliable communication with a minimum of overhead.•Simulation is conducted using Qualnet 5.0 in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed MTS routing protocol.

The expensive satellite communication currently accessible from ships is ill equipped to meet the needs of a growing number of seafaring Internet users. In order to provide cheap and high-speed Internet access to ships, the radio coverage of existing broadband networks can be extended through a multi-hop network that provides wireless links between neighboring ships. One of the most important issues in such networks is the appropriate choice of a routing protocol that provides efficient and reliable communication. In this paper, a maritime two-state routing protocol for a multi-hop ship network is proposed that provides efficient and reliable communication with a minimum of overhead. The maritime path loss model considered for simulations and the mobility model used in this paper represent real traffic of ships. In this paper, the proposed routing protocol is compared to the leading alternatives and simulation results are presented to quantify the performance.

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