Effective channel exploitation in IEEE 802.16j networks for maritime communications

Broadband wireless access for maritime users is a brand-new topic which demands sophisticated transmission technology to support high speed and wide coverage communications. Although the IEEE 802.16j network has been identified as a promising solution to broadband wireless access, the deployment of such networks in a maritime environment faces significant challenges because the natural movement of the ocean surface often causes the motion of stations and further leads to the variation in quality of communication channels. To tackle with these challenges and facilitate channel exploitation for deploying 802.16j based maritime communication networks, we first propose a novel scheme to specify the communication channel state between different maritime stations, based on which a new adaptation scheme is developed to exploit the optimal channel transmission capacity. Moreover, an adaptive traffic scheduling scheme is proposed to fully utilize the channel transmission bandwidth in 802.16j maritime networks. Simulation experiments have shown that the proposed schemes can fully exploit the maritime channels to achieve both satisfactory QoS performance and system throughput for maritime users. © 2011 IEEE.