Performance Analysis of a IoT-based Personal Vocal Assistant for Cruise Ships over Satellite Networks

Description

According to data traffic forecast reported in 1), the volume of data transported by Internet in 2021 will exceed the threshold of 3.0 ZB per year, generated by roughly 30 billions of devices. SATCOMs capability to bring Internet connectivity in parts of the world that until few years ago were impossible to reach (e.g., in the middle of the ocean), the use of satellite platforms for M2M services has become more and more widespread, with an unprecedented increase over the last five years (see for example 2 and 3) and expected further diffusion in the near future. One of the most interesting application, enabled by the Internet Of Things (IoT), that has attracted significant attentions in the M2M field is the Personal Vocal Assistant (PVA). It is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions given through voice instructions. The main contribution of this paper is a performance analysis, both theoretical and simulated, of satellite networks for PVA services over cruise ships. Namely, a PVA must provide a feedback to the user in a short amount of time to guarantee a high Quality of Experience (QoE) 4. For this analysis we tested different satellite providers and we come to a conclusion regarding their feasibility as a reference network for the PVS employment on a cruise ship. Future studies will investigate the proposed scenario by broadening the performance analysis through actual measurements over a real-world satellite channel to practically demonstrate the validity of our approach.

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