LTE massive MIMO (Pre-5G) test with an updated boat user terminal solution for land-to-boat scenarios in Oslo fjord

Autonomous shipping is considered to be one of the most important technologies in the maritime industry. Remote control of autonomous shipping is supported by communication solutions featuring long coverage, high throughput and low latency. Since 2018, together with the Norwegian Internet Service Provider (ISP) Telia, we have performed tests with a massive MIMO (Pre-5G) LTE base station, using the 3.7 GHz band, in Horten close to the Oslo fjord. The first Pre-5G tests with user terminal mounted on a 40 feet sailboat performed in 2018, showed great potential for maritime applications in terms of throughputs [1]. The Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) used in 2018 was a LTE Pre-5G terminal from Telia for fixed LAN use, and a modified version of it in 2019. However, since both the base station and the user terminal/CPE are not originally designed and optimized for maritime radio propagation environments, the test results in 2018 unveiled that a CPE designed for land usage experienced limited coverage and instability caused by received unstable signal level. Since 2019, a new user terminal prototype dedicated and optimized for maritime propagation conditions, was designed by Super Radio AS. This new CPE was tested in autumn 2019 under the similar setups as in 2018. The test results of the Reference Signal Receive Power and throughput are analysed and compared the test results in 2018. The comparison proved that the new user terminal solution showed considerable improvement with respect to stability and throughputs in the harsh maritime environments, which means that the new designed solution can be a potential maritime terminal solution for the remote control of autonomous shipping. The prototypes mounted at different places of the sailboat also show different system performances at the same TX-RX distances, which indicates the potential of exploiting the system diversity in the similar propagation environments.