2.1. In-Ship Communications

The network architecture for an autonomous vessel is described in Figure 1, focusing on in-ship network components and high-level ship-to-outside connections. The described architecture enables efficient data transfer and data processing on board.

Figure 1. Network architecture for an autonomous ship.

In order to automate a ship and make remote-controlled operations possible, one needs to have multiple data generating systems inside a vessel. In the proposed architecture, essential ship data database is a storage that includes all relevant data needed for autonomous operation. It gathers the data from different systems inside a ship and the reduced, fused data are sent to the remote operators.

Collision detection and situational awareness (SA) sensors produce more data than any other system in the architecture. The data comes from numerous systems such as radars, optical and infrared cameras, temperature and wind sensors, etc. The total amount of SA data grows quickly when multiple sensors with high resolution are used—a single high-definition video stream can be multiple megabytes per second. It should be noted that people can interpret imperfect SA sensor data. Thus, data processing and sensor fusion is used to reduce the amount and send only the needed part of the data to human operators or to the internal decision making. For example, 3D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) files with high resolution can be hundreds of megabytes each ^[5]. Using image processing methods on board of a ship one can transform a figure to a two-dimensional one and select only the relevant part of the figure to be transmitted. This could reduce the size of the figure, e.g., with a compression ratio of 200 before transmission. Sensor fusion not only reduces data, but it increases system robustness and reliability and broadens the sensing capabilities.

The SA data are used together with the navigation data from automatic identification system (AIS) system and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) to decide how to sail safely in any environment. The vessel is kept at the intended heading and position based on the SA data and dynamic positioning (DP) computer calculations that take into account wind, waves, and current. The DP system controls the thrusters and main propellers of the vessel accordingly. The aim for the decision making is to have as much intelligence on board of a ship as possible and enable it to operate autonomously for extended periods of time. However, the architecture enables opening a connection to remote operators when needed, so that a “virtual captain” could perform critical operations when the decision making at the ship, or the people on board, cannot solve the situation.

All vessels sailing in international waters are required to carry global maritime distress and safety (GMDSS) equipment in order to ensure the safety of life at sea. The equipment is used for alerting of a distress condition (including position), search and rescue, maritime safety information and general communications. IMO has published the international regulations for preventing collisions at sea (COLREGs) that define navigation rules to be followed at sea to prevent collisions between two or more vessels ^[20]. These rules have to be taken into account by the decision-making entity and the autopilot of the autonomous ship while steering the vessel in different situations. How early the decision and control command to stop or change the route and speed is made is based on the maneuverability of the ship.

In-ship systems also include sensors and actuators on machinery, ballast tanks, safety systems, cargo status and tracking and all these require data transmission. The majority of the in-ship critical communication is achieved using cables due to reliability requirements. In addition, the system needs to be redundant so that, e.g., a failure of a single router does not prevent critical connections.

2.2. Ship Gateway

Different systems in a ship may use different radio interfaces and wired connections. An autonomous vessel connects to other vessels and remote locations using satellites and terrestrial technologies. Successful connectivity management demands a gateway providing interoperability between different networks and devices. The gateway uses protocol conversion to connect different parts and technologies in the network and acts as a connection point in the ship linking the sensors and actuators with the decision making and the outside world.

The ship gateway provides a communication link to the public and private clouds, enabling offline services and real-time control over the in-ship equipment. It sends monitoring and sensor data from the ship to the cloud and remote operators, and receives controlling data, providing authenticated access to the in-ship system. An authenticated gateway hardens the network against attackers from the outside world. Without authentication, malicious users cannot be blocked from the network and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks will be threats.

2.3. Spectrum and Interference Management

Spectrum resources are important in order to support the capacity requirements of an autonomous vessel and be able to send required data to the remote operators over the depicted satellite–terrestrial systems. The available bandwidth is currently limited and there are two basic options to increase this—first, allocating a dedicated spectrum resource for the maritime connectivity system, which would most probably mean the use of higher-frequency bands, since bands below 6 GHz are allocated and heavily used; second, using spectrum sharing and dynamic spectrum access (DSA) technologies to obtain more resources. We believe that connections should be mainly implemented with a dedicated spectrum and DSA is an optional method that could be used in the overall architecture as depicted. The shared band would be especially useful for non-latency critical data.

It has recently been demonstrated how to use licensed shared access (LSA) for critical communication services ^[21] such as public safety connectivity. The spectrum database should include information on where, when, and using which transmission power the transmission would be possible. With DSA technology, the autonomous ship could, e.g., re-use cellular frequencies in national or international waters and the spectrum regulators will play a key role in enabling this possibility.

Spectrum management and re-selection is also needed to avoid intentional interference and jamming. When interference is detected, the connection can be changed to another frequency band.