OceanWave| Internet on the Ocean

Project Details

Awards & Nominations

OceanWave has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner
Global Nominee

The Challenge | Internet on the Ocean

The internet is not easily accessible in many areas of the world, like the Earth’s oceans. Fishermen, sailors, and others have limited data connection with the rest of the world. Although satellite internet is widely available, it is very expensive for a user to implement. Your challenge is to design a low-cost method of delivering internet to people located far away on the ocean.

OceanConnect

The difficult to provide internet on the oceans it's a emminent challenge and for that we porpouse one solution: make a ship-to-ship colaborative interaction interligated to internet provided ground bases at strategic points.

OceanWave

SECTIOn 1: WHY WE NEED INTERNET ON THE OCEAN?

Ocean internet connections are very expensive and too slow speed stablished today. In a globalized world, where reliable and fast connection became crucial, we offer a totally new high-speed collaborative network. Moreover, the actual tracking systems could take more than 48 hours to update locations or send some useful signal like wind speed, water quality, fishing results etc., and our idea provides full internet access to keep every ship in real-time contact.


SECTIOn 2: WHAT IS OceanConnect?

We propose to make a multi-hop network between the embarcations at the oceans and ground internet provided stations, these ones installed on strategic points based on most used ship routes.


Image 1: 24h ship tracking tool. www.marinetraffic.com



Image 2: Firsts basic connection points. Authors.



Table 1: Main shipment routes and respective distances between initial and final points. Authors.


Today we have in the market some cheapest radio devices that could reach 200 km of distance at interpoint connections and up to 500mbps of speed, making the connecting between ships more stable and affordable. Once each antenna covers 45-degree angle, we build a structure with 8 of them to cover all 360-degree range.

However, when a ship get uncommunicable, internet data could not be lost, so we propose to integrate the NASA's Disruption Tolerant Networking with some modifications, i.e., when two or more ships get in contact, them trade the new data of both between themselves, and the first to get real internet connect could transfer that accumulated data. This become possible from the acoplation of a customized cache server in each ship network.



To get high-speed read and write speed of DTN cache server, its needed to build a RAID0 mechanism with 4 HDD's that will reach about 125mbps each one and up to 500mbps total.

How a medium ship speed is about 50km/h, two ships could trade about 9GB of data from the start of connection to the end, more than enough for usual web use and much more in comparison to the actual satellite connections (128 up to 2048kbps, reaching 30-480MB in the same 4 hours period today). This make possible one ship connect with more than 200 other embarcations and trade totally new data without overwrite old files, but to avoid full disk troubles, we seted a expiring time for data packets to 24 hours, more than enough to a ship share them with much others.


Table 2: Satellite connection for ships pricing. www.reviews.org.



Table 3: Estimated retail price to construct the core of the device. Authors.


To increase the system efficiency, how each packet will be identified, when data get some ground contact, a back signal to them become deleted from ships servers will be sent, and a ship will recuse those packets from a new connection, even telling him to delete too. The database of packets to be kept or trashed even will not became big, because a max time to store will be set to 24 hours, keeping only the last day info. Furthermore, all packets going to be encrypted with the most secure encoding parameters, making impossible any non-authorized connection interception between countries and/or companies.

Although our project doesn’t provide a full broadband connection, the connection is cheapy, much faster than satellite ones (see Table 2) and the delay when a ship get fully uncommunicable should be maximum to some minutes, until he gets in touch with some other. And when a full multipoint connection could be stablished (almost every time), the web navigation will be like the ground-based one, with real-time response.









Ubiquiti AF-5XHD-BR Airfiber

Ubiquiti Airfiberx AF-5G23-S45

Dell PowerEdge T30 Business

WD Gold 2TB Enterprise Class

Modulator and Transmitter

RX/TX Antenna

Data Server

Data Storage Device


SECTIOn 3: wILL THIS REALLY WORK?

According to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), that has the most accurate statistics on the current state of shipping worldwide, we have more than 50.700 active ships on the seas. This made possible stablish a giant, fast and trustable multi-hop network that increase navigation speed in 25x and reduce the costs in 86%.

SECTIOn 4: References