Empowering 6G maritime communications with distributed intelligence and over-the-air model sharing

Introduction: Shipping and maritime transportation have gradually gained a key role in worldwide economical strategies and modern business models. The realization of Smart Shipping (SMS) powered by advanced 6G communication networks, as well as innovative Machine Learning (ML) solutions, has recently become the focal point in the maritime sector. However, conventional centralized learning schemes are unsuitable in the maritime domain, due to considerable data communication overhead, stringent energy constraints, increased transmission failures in the harsh propagation environment, as well as data privacy concerns.Methods: To overcome these challenges, we propose the joint adoption of Federated Learning (FL) principles and the utilization of the Over-the-Air computation (AirComp) wireless transmission framework. Thus, this paper initially describes the mathematical considerations of a 6G maritime communication system, focusing on the heterogeneity of the relevant nodes and the channel models, including an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided relaying model that is usually required in maritime communications. The communication network, enhanced with the AirComp technique for efficiency purposes, forms the technical basis for the collaborative learning across multiple Internet of Maritime Things (IoMT) nodes in FL tasks. The workflow of the FL/AirComp scheme is illustrated and proposed as a communication-efficient and privacy-aware SMS framework, considering spectrum and energy efficiency aspects under a sum transmitting power constraint.Results: Then, the performance of the proposed methodology is assessed in an important ML task, related to intelligent maritime transportation systems, namely, the prediction of the Cargo Ship Propulsion Power using real data originating from six cargo ships and utilizing long-short-term-memory (LSTM) neural networks. Upon extensive experimentation, FL showed higher prediction accuracy relative to the typical Ensemble Learning technique by a factor of 3.04. The AirComp system performance was evaluated under varying noise conditions and number of IoMT nodes, using simulation data for the channel state information by regulating the power of the transmitting IoMT entities and the scaling factor at the shore base station.Discussion: The results clearly indicate the efficiency of the proposed FL/AirComp scheme in achieving low computation error, collaborative learning, spectrum efficiency and privacy protection in wireless maritime communications, while providing adequate accuracy levels with respect to the optimization objective.