This article aims to put forward the utilization of onshore narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) infrastructure for tracking of containers transported by marine cargo vessels while operating near the coastline. We introduce and evaluate three connectivity strategies, including direct sensor-to-onshore base station (BS) transmission as well as two relay-aided schemes using dedicated vessel-BS or unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV)-mounted BS as intermediate nodes. To assess and compare the proposed schemes in terms of the message loss and delay metrics as well as sensor lifetimes, we first employ stochastic geometry to characterize the connectivity process with the onshore deployment and then resort to system-level simulations. Our results indicate that the direct access option suffers from the poorest performance. The relay-based alternatives allow to dramatically improve the system operation by effectively distributing the transmission requests over time at the relay side and thus mitigating contention. Furthermore, gains enabled with UAV relaying are due to extended coverage that increases the available BS density. The considered relaying operation may help tolerate intermittent connectivity across a broad range of system parameters.

中文翻译：

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近岸船舶导航过程中用于集装箱跟踪的岸上 NB-IoT 性能分析


本文旨在提出利用陆上窄带物联网（NB-IoT）基础设施来跟踪在海岸线附近运营的海运货船运输的集装箱。我们介绍并评估了三种连接策略，包括直接传感器到岸上基站（BS）传输以及使用专用船舶BS或无人机（UAV）安装BS作为中间节点的两种中继辅助方案。为了在消息丢失和延迟指标以及传感器寿命方面评估和比较所提出的方案，我们首先采用随机几何来表征与陆上部署的连接过程，然后采用系统级模拟。我们的结果表明直接访问选项的性能最差。基于中继的替代方案可以通过在中继侧随时间有效地分配传输请求来显着改善系统操作，从而减轻争用。此外，无人机中继带来的收益是由于覆盖范围扩大，增加了可用基站密度。所考虑的中继操作可能有助于容忍广泛的系统参数范围内的间歇性连接。