Proactive Link Adaptation for Marine Internet of Things in TV White Space

By connecting the maritime users to Internet, e.g., boats, ships, etc., it is possible to operate maritime sensing and informatics across seas and oceans. Such marine Internet of things (MIoT) is urging intelligent maritime applications, e.g., real-time vessel tracking, navigation safety, autonomous shipping, etc. Due to the bandwidth limitation of conventional marine channels, broadband communication is desired for these emerging applications. In this paper, we consider operating the TV white space (TVWS) spectrum in 700MHz to support the near-sea surface communication for MIoT terminals. To better utilize the TV channel capacity, we propose a proactive and efficient link adaptation (LA) scheme based on nonlinear autoregressive neural network (NARNN) time series prediction. Specifically, the historical signal samplings are used to predict the near-sea-surface channel link status for the next transmission slot, which is then used to select a proper modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for the next egress frame. We have conducted extensive simulations, and show that the average channel utility can achieve almost 85% of the optimal capacity. The proposed LA scheme can provide useful inspirations for applying data analytics to efficient and adaptive LA schemes for mobile Internet of things.