An Analysis of Maritime Communications between a Ship at Sea and a Shore Station by a Ray-based Monte Carlo Method

In this paper, an analysis of maritime communications between a ship at sea and a shore station using a ray-based Monte Carlo method has been proposed. A sea surface is modeled by the one-side Pierson-Moskowitz spectrum. A Monte Carlo method based on a ray tracing is employed to predict the scattering from the temporally evolving rough sea surface for each time step. The maximum of double reflections is restricted in the ray tracing for a practical purpose. The total received signal is the superposition of the direct propagating field and the scattered field by the sea surface. The statistical numerical result is finally obtained by averaging the results from many realizations. Numerical results for the link performance evaluation obtained by the proposed method are illustrated. The results show that the misalignment of transmitting and receiving antennas due to the rolling ship has relatively less impact on the communication link performance than the multipath fading due to the scattering by the temporally evolving rough sea surface.