VSTP: vessel spatio-temporal contact pattern detection based on MapReduce

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Oct 2017

Due to lack of the coverage of 3G/4G network, satellite communication which costs excessively is the main approach used in ocean to provide network service. Ocean mobile delay tolerant network (OMDTN) can provide low-cost data transmission service in the network by utilizing the contact chances of moving vessels. Spatio-temporal contact pattern is one of the key metrics to improve the efficiency of the routing algorithm in OMDTN. Some researches have been carried out on human handheld device and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the vessel’s trajectory data is distributed and stored disorderly, which makes traditional contact pattern detection algorithm cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we design a parallel algorithm named VSTP based on MapReduce to detect spatio-temporal contact pattern from trajectories of over 2000 vessels. Studying the vessels’ trajectories and the contact records, we observe that the vessels’ contact pattern including inter-contact time distribution and contact times distribution is in sharp contrast to the study on human handheld device and VANETs. Our results can provide the guidelines for the design of data routing protocols on OMDTN and give a new solution to overcome the difficulty of ocean network coverage.

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VSTP: vessel spatio-temporal contact pattern detection based on MapReduce

Liu et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking VSTP: vessel spatio-temporal contact pattern detection based on MapReduce Chao Liu 0 Zhongwei Sun 0 Jing Liu Haiguang Huang Zhongwen Guo Yuan Feng 0 Equal contributors Department of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China , Songling Road No. 238, Qingdao 266100 , China Due to lack of the coverage of 3G/4G network, satellite communication which costs excessively is the main approach used in ocean to provide network service. Ocean mobile delay tolerant network (OMDTN) can provide low-cost data transmission service in the network by utilizing the contact chances of moving vessels. Spatio-temporal contact pattern is one of the key metrics to improve the efficiency of the routing algorithm in OMDTN. Some researches have been carried out on human handheld device and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the vessel's trajectory data is distributed and stored disorderly, which makes traditional contact pattern detection algorithm cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we design a parallel algorithm named VSTP based on MapReduce to detect spatio-temporal contact pattern from trajectories of over 2000 vessels. Studying the vessels' trajectories and the contact records, we observe that the vessels' contact pattern including inter-contact time distribution and contact times distribution is in sharp contrast to the study on human handheld device and VANETs. Our results can provide the guidelines for the design of data routing protocols on OMDTN and give a new solution to overcome the difficulty of ocean network coverage. Contact pattern; Empirical data analysis; Delay tolerant network; MapReduce; Sensor network 1 Introduction Ocean network communication is one of the most important research topics in the field of ocean information technology in the future. It plays an important role in vessel communication, ocean observation and military security. Currently, the main communication means of ocean vessels include HF and VHF radio communication [ 1–3 ], onboard laser communication [ 4 ], cellular mobile network [ 5 ], and maritime satellite communication [ 6 ]. HF and VHF radio communication are vulnerable to atmospheric interference, thus having blind coverage areas and poor confidentiality. Its communication requires a predetermined frequency which makes it impossible to provide network service in large-scale ocean area. At present, it is only suitable for the internal communication among fleet of vessels and the directional communication to the seashore base station. Laser communication has many advantages, such as high bandwidth and confidentiality, but it is not suitable for providing general oceanic network communication services due to the targeting problem. Because of high cost of setting up the ocean base station, the cellular network cannot provide the network coverage for medium or long distance of sea area and frequent network data transmission will lead to high communication cost. Currently, maritime satellite communication is a good way of ocean network communication. However, the high price of terminals and communication expenses prohibit it from large-scale application. In short, existing ocean communication schemes are restricted by the limitation of the communication mode and high infrastructure deployment cost and communication expenses; thus, they cannot provide low-cost large-scale oceanic network services. Hence, ocean network communication is a problem that should be solved quickly. The ocean mobile delay tolerant network can provide mutual communication opportunity through the movement of the vessels in the network and provide lowcost data transmission service in the whole network without any infrastructure. In the process of data routing in the mobile delay tolerant network, the optimal routing path can be computed efficiently if the obtained information base (such as the contact pattern, hot spots area among nodes, and the movement pattern model) is very comprehensive. Therefore, it is the key problem in the research of ocean network communication to explore the rules of vessel movement and contact pattern from the large-scale moving trajectory data of vessels. However, there are many unique characteristics of vessel trajectory data. Firstly, the vessel moving trajectory data is sparse. Due to the pressure of the base stations, capacity constraints of satellite communication, equipment’s stability and the vessel density in the sea and so on, under normal circumstances, the timestamp interval of vessel trajectory data is different and it is from 3 to 20 min in general. This results in the characteristic of sparseness in the vessel trajectory data. The missing data is short-time missing data. In addition, because some fishermen lack the safety operation awareness and do not open the VMS (Vessel Monitoring System), there is long-term missing data in part of the vessels’ trajectory. (...truncated)


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Chao Liu, Zhongwei Sun, Jing Liu, Haiguang Huang, Zhongwen Guo, Yuan Feng. VSTP: vessel spatio-temporal contact pattern detection based on MapReduce, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2017, pp. 175, Volume 2017, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s13638-017-0960-x