MCLORA: Maritime ad-hoc communication system based on LORA

Abstract

Maritime communication plays a crucial role in fields such as ocean resource exploration and marine environmental monitoring. Existing maritime communication methods either face challenges in equipment deployment or are limited by high power requirements, making sustained operation difficult. The emergence of LoRa presents an opportunity in this regard, with its characteristics of low power consumption and long communication range, meeting the demands for long-term maritime communication. However, LoRa’s underlying implementation is not open-source, and LoRaWAN itself adopts a star topology, limiting communication between nodes. Therefore, we have devised a communication packet header working at the application layer to enable peer-to-peer communication between nodes. Our on-campus field tests have shown that our system can achieve node-to-node communication, networking functionalities, with a packet delivery rate more than 94%, and max data transmission rate can achieve 1027 bps. In the sea test, the communication rate of our node remained basically around 1035 bps due to the absence of objects blocking the line of sight, and packet delivery rate was more than 96%. The byte error rates of all experiments were less than 0.5%.

Keywords

Low-power wide-area networks / Ad-hoc networks / Maritime communication / LORA

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jie Zhang: Writing - original draft, Validation, Software, Project administration, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Hui Liu: Formal analysis. Yusheng He: Conceptualization. Wei Gao: Supervision. Nannan Xu: Supervision, Formal analysis. Chao Liu: Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62272427), Hainan Provincial Joint Project of Sanya Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City, China (2021JJLH0060), and Youth Innovation Team of Shan-dong Provincial, China (2022KJ043).

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