Coverage Enhancement Using UAVs for Cognitive Marine Network

Like terrestrial communications, marine users also need stable network paths between any source and destination pair. Besides the rough sea surface, another issue in this network is the communication range. Marine users in deep sea are distant from the base stations (BS) onshore, resulting in fragile links. To solve this problem, the literature has suggested the use of multiple relay nodes to stabilize the network. But more relays need more bandwidth to establish a stable link between any two communicating nodes. However, the dedicated spectrum for marine communications has been found to be scarce due to the increase in number of users and their service demands. Therefore, we propose a cognitive routing scheme in marine environments, which uses unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as mobile BS and/or relays to handle the above-mentioned issues. Preferring a satellite-free network for marine users, we opt for UAVs to enhance the communication range. Because spectrum is a precious resource, we apply spectrum sensing technique to address spectrum scarcity by keeping primary user activity undisturbed. Finally, we ensure an optimal path for the cognitive marine environment that exhibits a high packet delivery ratio, less delay and overhead, and prove it by comparing our scheme to various reference schemes.