An IoT enabled system for marine data acquisition and cartography

Traditional marine monitoring systems such as oceanographic and hydrographic re- search vessels use either wireless sensor networks with a limited coverage, or expensive satellite communication that is not suitable for small and mid-sized vessels. This the- sis proposes an Internet of Marine Things data acquisition and cartography system in the marine environment using Very High Frequency (VHF) available on the majority of ships. The proposed system is equipped with sensors such as sea depth, tempera- ture, wind speed and direction, and the collected data is sent through a Ship Ad-hoc Network (SANET) to 5G edge clouds connected to sink/base station nodes on shore. The sensory data is ultimately aggregated at a central cloud on the internet to produce up to date cartography systems. Several observations and challenges unique to the marine environment have been discussed and feed into the solutions presented. We have investigated the application of appropriate data quantization and compression techniques to the marine sensor data collected in order to reduce the size of transmit- ted data and achieve better transmission efficiency. The impact of marine sparsity on the network is examined and a marine Mobile Ad-hoc/Delay Tolerant hybrid routing protocol (MADNET) is proposed to switch automatically between Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) and Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing according to the network connectivity. The low rate data transmission offered by VHF radio has been investigated in terms of the network bottlenecks and the data collection rate achiev- able near the sinks. A sensory data management and transmission approach has also been proposed at the 5G network core using Information Centric Networks (ICN) aimed at providing efficient and duplicate less transmission of marine sensory read- ings from the base station/sink nodes towards the central cloud. Therefore, SANETs are realized as part of a 5G infrastructure for marine environment monitoring, paving the way to the Internet of Marine Things (IoMaT).