Cognitive Routing in Software-Defined Maritime Networks

Due to the constantly changing sea surface, there is a high risk of link fragility caused by sea waves when different marine users are intended to establish stable links for communication. To ensure stability with less delay, finding a stable route is one of the crucial aspects of maritime networks. In order to achieve this aim, we propose a routing protocol for cognitive maritime networks based on software-defined networking (SDN). This SDN-based cognitive routing protocol provides stable routes among different marine users. To provide the global view of the whole network, a main controller is placed close to the seashore, whereas the localized views are provided by the cluster heads. Autonomous surface vehicles are used as gateways under sparse network conditions to collect and transport data among clusters, and to and from the main controller. This is an SDN-based ship-to-ship communication scheme where two ships can only establish a link when they not only have consensus about a common idle channel but are also within the communication range of each other. We perform extensive simulations to test the proposed scheme with different parameters and find better performance in comparison with both SDN-based and non-SDN-based schemes in terms of end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and routing overhead ratio.