World's biggest cruise ship sails through wireless challenges

Royal Caribbean teams with Cisco to provide luxury services

By Tim Greene, Network World
January 12, 2010 03:54 PM ET

The world's longest cruise ship posed knotty wireless networking problems but also provided Royal Caribbean the opportunity to pounce on iPhones, touchscreens and MPLS networking in order to deliver luxury services.

10 top iPhone apps for IT pros

Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas houses 2,700 guest cabins and can accommodate 6,300 passengers and 2,160 crew members. The wired VoIP phone network has 4,000 extensions including one in each passenger cabin. There are 1,100 IP surveillance cameras to monitor activity aboard ship, and 370 Cisco plasma and LCD IP touch screen signs placed around the ship post notices of daily activities. The screens can also be used by passengers to get directions to other locations on the ship, according to Max Schmidt, associate vice president of IT and operations, and Greg Martin, network manager for the cruise line.

Click to see: The Royal Caribbean

All that gear is complex enough without introducing a Wi-Fi network that has to function inside spaces defined by metal hulls and bulkheads that wreak havoc with wireless broadcast patterns. "It's a challenging environment," Martin says. The ship is divided into zones that can be shut off with fire doors so impermeable that closing them actually alters the effective range of some of the access points, he says. "We need additional access points for that or the wireless signals will not penetrate," Martin says.

Related Content

In all, it takes more than 900 access points -- all the gear is from Cisco -- to supply pervasive coverage throughout the vessel. Every cabin has wireless access, for IP phones or for Internet connectivity, and the cabin doors are heavy enough to affect wireless signals, he says.

Planners first designed the wireless network based on best estimates of how signals would be affected by the materials that make up the ship. Then as they were deployed within the ship, each access point was tweaked for power and orientation to achieve full coverage, Martin says.

"It was a greenfield design, but a ship changes over time," he says. So the wireless team visited it during construction to test out how well the access points worked on site. Sometimes the optimal location for an access point was unsuitable for architectural reasons, requiring relocation and more tweaking, he says. "Typically we have to work around the design requirements of the ship," he says.

One challenge was that for the many types of network users -- various classes of crew and passenger voice, Internet access, and data -- designers thought they would need 13 different SSIDs for the network. "That's not necessarily within the realm of best practices," Schmidt says. They managed to get that number down to five and resorted to using multiple virtual LANs over some of them. Cisco wireless control points impose priority for voice and video access over data, Martin says.

Passengers can rent pairs of iPhones on board that are loaded with ship-specific applications. For instance, there's a location-finding app that maps where the partner phone is so passengers can easily track traveling companions. Passengers can also rent Ekahau asset tags they attach to their children. When the children move, the tags tell an iPhone app where they've gone and it's displayed on the phone's screen. The phones also display daily shipboard activities.