Communication architecture based on intelligent autonomous vehicles for container terminals

Automated container terminal is one of the most important confined areas that have attracted extensive research interests over last decade. To improve productivity, as well as enhance operational efficiency of a sea port, automated container terminals must play an important role in global cargo transportation by saving energy consumption, reducing the service cost and increasing the cargo throughput. To achieve these requirements, the development of reliable heterogeneous communication system among all communicating objects such as Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV), Confined Base Station (CBS) and RFID-based container that communicate inside container terminals, becomes a paramount objective. This communication system has specific challenges comparing to classical vehicular communication systems ones by emphasizing mainly on IAV-to-IAV, IAV-to-CBS and IAV-to- RFID-based container communications. Our aim in this paper is to introduce the IAV architecture dealing with IAVs based communication system, and then present candidate communication technologies for port container terminals. Further discussions about challenging issues will also be provided.