Data-Driven Trajectory Quality Improvement for Promoting Intelligent Vessel Traffic Services in 6G-Enabled Maritime IoT Systems

Future generation communication systems, such as 5G and 6G wireless systems, exploit the combined satellite-terrestrial communication infrastructures to extend network coverage and data throughput for data-driven applications. These ground-breaking techniques have promoted the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) in maritime industries. In maritime IoT applications, intelligent vessel traffic services can be guaranteed by collecting and analyzing high volume of spatial data flows from automatic identification system (AIS). This AIS system includes a highly integrated automatic equipment, including functionalities of core communication, tracking, and sensing. The increased utilization of shipboard AIS devices allows the collection of massive trajectory data. However, the received raw AIS data often suffers from undesirable outliers (i.e., poorly tracked timestamped points for vessel trajectories) during signal acquisition and analog-to-digital conversion. The degraded AIS data will bring negative effects on vessel traffic services (e.g., maritime traffic monitoring, intelligent maritime navigation, vessel collision avoidance, etc.) in maritime IoT scenarios. To improve the quality of vessel trajectory records from AIS networks, we propose to develop a two-phase data-driven machine learning framework for vessel trajectory reconstruction. In particular, a density-based clustering method is introduced in the first phase to automatically recognize the undesirable outliers. The second phase proposes a bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM)-based supervised learning technique to restore the timestamped points degraded by random outliers in vessel trajectories. Comprehensive experiments on simulated and realistic data sets have verified the dominance of our two-phase vessel reconstruction framework compared to other competing methods. It thus has the capacity of promoting intelligent vessel traffic services in 6G-enabled maritime IoT systems.