Quokka Team| Internet on the Ocean

Project Details

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.

Connected Oceans

Our idea for connect the person in the oceans is to build a network infrastructure involving all the entities that now are navigating the ocean.

Quokka Team

Our idea for connect the people in the oceans is to build a network infrastructure involving all the entities that now are navigating the ocean.

The hardware of our infrastructure are only antennas that works around 2100Mhz that are capable to a transmission radius of 100km with acceptable performance.

We tough that will be possible to connect every boat in the ocean to each other and create a wireless network infrastructure that could give to each person in the ocean at least a basic internet connection.

The end part of infrastructure are the routers that needs to be placed in the ports or near the coast because of latency.

The hardest thing is only the instradation problem but we tough that due to relatively slow speed of the boats is possible to create every packet loss a map of the antennas and recalculate the route for the packet to the nearest router.

The first thing that every boat does is a network scanning, based on GPS position to decide wich is the nearest port to send the packets.

After the boat starts scanning for the boat near it, then it builds a network map and applies to that an instradation algorithm that builds the instradation rules for the packet.

This happen every time that happens at least one of the following:

  • packet loss
  • to high latency
  • node down
  • exit from a coverage area

Some problems of this system are potential loop in packet routing, due to the fact that the antennas are on the boat that are moving around.

Another problem is a potential connection loss if the boat is far away to all the other boats that has antennas on.

In that way the only solution will be a satellite connection.

We found out that this kind of network is possible to realise due to the fact that the more followed routes are full of boats and ships that are often distanced by 50km or less as is possible to see there:


Used Recources:

-> https://www.nauticalalmanac.it/it/navigazione-marittima/ais-posizione-delle-navi.html

-> James F. Kurose, Keith W. Ross, Reti di Calcolatori e Internet. Un approccio Top-Down

-> www.wikipedia.org