Capacity analysis for broadband communications on sea

Abstract

Maritime communication currently changes from analog to digital in the VHF band. The limited bandwidth of 100 kHz in the VHF band results in low data rates of a maximum of 100 kbit/s in a region of several of to 70 kilometers. Alternative solutions could be the access to 3G or 4G cellular communication systems which offer data rates of up to tens of megabits. However, these access schemes are designed for a very limited coverage of several hundreds of meters for mobile users and are seldom available on the sea. Therefore, in the ITS band at 5, 85 GHz a broadband channel of 20 MHz is defined for maritime applications. In this paper we analyze the communication capacity depending on the different antenna heights and different distances between transmitter and receiver.