Connecting Cargo Ships to the Shore: Future of NB-IoT for Maritime Communications

The maritime cargo transportation industry has experienced explosive growth over the past decade. This industry aims to adopt new technologies for supply chain automation to decrease the volume of damaged goods that have recently reached an unprecedented 20%. Particularly, careful tracking and monitoring of all cargo is vital for maritime service operators. In this work, we first review the state-of-the-art communication enablers for container tracking systems and then assess the use of onshore Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) infrastructure to improve the reli-ability of conventional satellite-based tracking systems driven by tenfold decrease in service costs. We demonstrate that relaying nodes may allow for the offloading of up to 80% of traffic onto the coastal NB-IoT infrastructure while maintaining satisfactory data latency and node lifetime performance. Finally, we identify key challenges and outline future perspectives in this important area.