Evaluation of the IEEE 802.16 Mesh MAC for Multihop Inter-ship Communications

An IEEE 802.16 MESH network is envisaged for multihop inter-ship communications and its MAC performance is investigated by simulations. Results show that, with respect to throughput, delivery ratio, and average delay, when sea wave direction is perpendicular to the nodes connection direction, good MESH MAC performance can be achieved in sea states 1.0, 3.0, 5.0, and 7.0, for both 1-hop and 2-hop CBR connections with hop distance more than 10 km. With relative parallel wave direction, in sea states 1.0 and 3.0, the MAC performance is close to that of the perpendicular case while it drops in sea state 5.0 and 7.0; however the delivery ratio can still be more than 60 percent. With increase in 1-hop CBR data flows, the network throughput increases linearly in sea state 1.0; but the increase in throughput becomes slower in higher sea states.