Benchmarking of Emulated Wireless Edge Cloud Connectivity for Maritime Environments

Remote ship pilotage, smart fairway navigation, autonomous maritime transport and smart maritime logistics present new challenges to the maritime industry. One of the challenges is increasing dependency on reliable network connectivity that can range from low priority entertainment communications to high priority safety critical communications. Traffic prioritization is needed at the open sea, where ships typically resort to expensive satellite connectivity that incurs long latency and narrow bandwidth. Near the coastline, ships can switch to 5G-based communications with low latency and high bandwidth, and possibly even utilize low-latency edge computing capabilities. Our contribution in this paper is a cloud-based networking testbed that supports network traffic shaping to emulate satellite and 5G-based communications between an edge cloud located onboard a ship and another edge cloud located onboard another ship or at the shore under traffic loss scenarios. Potential use-cases for our work include emulation of peer-to-peer communications (i.e., ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore) and mesh networking. The system can also be used as a basis for real-time ship networking, for instance, as building block for traffic prioritization in Kubernetes-based edge clouds.