NMEA2000 Ship Area Network Design and Test Bed using Power Line Communication

Abstract

Under the recent changes in international agreements enforced by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), sea-going vessels are required to establish the Controller Area Network (CAN Bus) system to be connected with a backbone network referred as the Ship Area Network (SAN) by installing communication cables to control and monitor on-board electronic equipments when they are additionally mounted the ship’s system. The latest SAN is comprised of the Control Area Network (CAN) and the Ethernet-based physical communications network, both of which support the National Marine Electronic Association (NMEA) 2000 standard protocol. For existing operational ships, an extensive work will be needed for the SAN that uses unshielded twisted pair cables (UTP) depending on the location of the system to be installed. Such work could generate time, space and cost-related risks (e.g., large vessel require up to millions of won per day as an anchorage charge). Thus, in this paper, we’ve installed the Power Line Communication (PLC) system on an actual ship within a day utilizing the power lines which have already been laid throughout the most part of the ship. Especially, we applied the PLC technology which had employed 3-phase 4-wire type winding method (for on-land use) proposed in this paper but in this case, we designed a data coupling method for the 3-phase 3-wire type Delta winding power line without N-phase grounding system on the ship instead. Then, by using this method, the integrated network technology that meets NMEA 2000 standard was designed and the test bed was constructed accordingly. As the result, we’ve confirmed that the communications became efficient and consider that the technology will be a foundation technology for the ships’ IoT services and for the cost-reducing purpose.