Prototyping of an integrated, white-space solution for the enforcement of Ship Reporting Systems

Ship Reporting Systems (SRSs) have been standardized with the goal of enforcing safety in navigation. Automatic Identification System (AIS) is the most known SRS but, given the limited available bandwidth, it supports a simple, basic set of services without dealing with security aspects. Specifically to address such weaknesses, this paper explores a possible backward-compatible solution aimed at increasing the safety and flexibility provided by the current AIS systems: the proposed solution exploits a complementary channel set in the TV White Space frequencies; the paper also presents the integration work which led to the prototyping, together with a first set of practical tests.