Knowing who and when to deliver: An optimal stopping method for maritime data scheduling

The exponential growth of services demands on the sea drives the development of prospective maritime wideband networks. In this paper, the transmission of surveillance videos on board via a maritime wideband communication network is investigated. The latest Time Division Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE) and delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) technology are combined to construct a shore based network framework in order to provide a wide-range transmission over the sea. Accordingly, a video data store-carry-and-forward routing topology is utilized, tailoring for the intermittent network connectivity to efficiently deliver the video data. This study proposes a Two-step Time and Energy Oriented Optimal-stopping (TTEOO) algorithm leveraging backward induction method, based on the optimal stopping rules to schedule data delivery, under the constraint of end-to-end delay of video data and energy consumption of DTN throw box. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can achieve low consumption cost and high data delivery ratio for the oversea video transmission applications.

I. Introduction

The advances in wireless communication techniques and the exponential growth of services demands on the sea, have attracted a growing interest in the development of maritime wideband communication networks for emerging applications. It is envisioned that the booming network will play a significant role in multiple communication tasks on the sea, e.g., the timely and reliable transmission of surveillance videos on board which is forceful evidence for marine accident investigation. However, off-the-shelf maritime wideband systems mainly depend on satellite to relay the information and the corresponding fee is prohibitive [1]. Therefore, adopting satellite system to deliver wideband data is not a wise choice. With the support of prospective maritime networks, some emerging services could be inspired with low communication cost, e.g., safety-related monitoring, multimedia data uploading or downloading and real-time cargo monitoring and management, which brings great revolution to maritime society.