A Routing Protocol for WiMAX Based Maritime Wireless Mesh Networks

We envisage extending radio coverage of the existing terrestrial wireless broadband networks to the sea to provide ships with high speed connection to the Internet. This is achieved by forming a WiMAX-based maritime wireless mesh network where ships are network nodes connected to the land station across multiple hops. In such a wireless mesh network, routing protocol plays an important role in providing efficient and reliable communications. This paper proposes a routing protocol, called MRPT (MAC-based Routing Protocol for TRITON), that piggybacks routing information on WiMAX mesh MAC control messages. This provides proactiveness and readily available multi-path for traffic from ship to land station. For traffic from land station to ship, the proposed routing protocol uses a bitmap encoding to efficiently inform land station of the constructed routing tree. Simulation results confirm that MRPT outperforms AODV, AOMDV and OLSR in terms of delay and throughput.