On-board Communication Challenges

The main objectives of the MarCom project (Maritime Communication, broadband at sea) are to investigate the main user needs and requirements to communication technologies within the maritime community. An important part of this is providing on board services to the crew, passengers and ship operations. In order to facilitate the MarCom project will propose a Generic Scalable Service Platform to handle the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ of communication. Development of this platform presents a series of challenges and considerations presented in this paper. In this paper we will indicate what challenges and possibilities this implicates for a solution for On Board LAN (Local Area Network), SOA (a WebService Oriented Architechture), and wireless communication.