DRAFT INTRODUCTION PAPER , ACHMAD WIBISONO

I. INTRODUCTION PAPER

In developing countries like Indonesia, marine fisheries involve fishing activities by small fishing
ships, including small traditional boats, which become the backbone of economic activities in fishing
villages and the livelihood of small fishermen, many of whom are poor. In this regard, the success of
their fishing activities is often limited by the lack of near-real-time information on potential fish
locations and, hence, very much dependent on luck. To improve their success probability, it is desired
to provide a system, which is relatively simple and affordable, to send information on predicted fish
location to the small ships. In this regard, attempts to identify potential fishing locations have been
reported in the literature, such as in [1]-[3].

There have also been efforts to share information of good fishing locations among fishermen or to
deliver it from coastal stations to the sailing fishermen [4]-[9].

Methods used to deliver such information to the small ships include the use of satellites and cellular
networks. The former requires communication equipment that might be unaffordable for the fishermen,
while the latter depends on the availability of operating cellular networks in the nearby coastal areas.
Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a navigation instrument that plays an important role in sea
transportation safety. AIS radio systems on ships send and receive information digitally to ports or
other ships on VHF operators [10].

Besides safety purposes, the AIS has also been used in monitoring and tracking the routes taken by
fishing vessels for fishery management [11] - [14].

This indicates the potential of AIS for providing an affordable means to deliver potential fishing zone
information to the small ships. There has also been an effort to design an AIS receiver for use in small
fishing vessels [15]. In this paper, we describe a further initiative to develop methods and algorithms
for inserting data/messages into AIS transmission data packets in addition to those standardized by
ITU-R [10],

by utilizing the free slots provided by AIS packet transmission access. The new message carries the
potential fish position information, hereby declared as Message-33 In Section II we explain our
problem formulation and define the scope of our solution. In Section III, we explain some of the
reference technology standards and methodologies that are referred to, and then in Section IV, we
explain the formats, methods, and algorithms that have been developed. In Section V, we describe the
testing process and the process of analyzing test results. Conclusions are given in Section VI.