PER Estimation of AIS in Inland Rivers based on Three Dimensional Ray Tracking

• Main Authors: F. Ma, X.M. Chu, C.G. Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Gdynia Maritime University 2014-03-01
• Series: TransNav: International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation
• Subjects: Ray Tracking; Three Dimensional Ray Tracking; Automatic Identification System (AIS); Package Error Rate (PER); Chinese Navigable Waterways; Inland Shipping; PER Estimation; Ray Tracking Model
• Online Access: http://www.transnav.eu/files/PER Estimation of AIS in Inland Rivers based on Three Dimensional Ray Tracking,486.pdf

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an important maritime safety device, which is populous in inland rivers. Compared with that in open sea, the Package Error Rate (PER) of AIS in inland river has increased sharply due to its complex environment. With the help of hardware in loop simulation, it is possible to make statistical calculation on the PER under a given field strength and describe the data by quadratic rational fraction. Meanwhile, in the three dimensional software environments, the signal field strength is able to be calculated by the ray tracking method, which exhausts all the possible propagation paths, including direct way, reflection, diffractions, and the other medium attenuation matters. Beyond that, in the model, the propagation geography information in inland rivers is required to be simplified in some way, or the computation of the ray tracking is too hard to get. The paper set the Changjiang Wuhan channel as the field testing region, and all the deviations are less than 5% in sunny weather, which proves the method accurate and effective.