# The Development of Key Technologies in Applications of Vessels Connected to the Internet
## 3 Characteristics of the Internet of Vessels  
### Information Processing and Information Fusion  
In the IoV system, the objects of the information collection are bridges, ships, ship locks, channels, meteorology and hydrology and so on. All the information is in static and dynamic states. Due to the variety of the information sources, the data formats of different sources are quite different. The information from the IoV system has the feature of multi-source heterogeneous [44; 45; 46]. Therefore, the information fusion becomes the most important stage of the intelligent information processing. The information fusion is a kind of multi-level, multi-aspect information process including multi-source data detection, correlation, combination and estimation. It could obtain the results and the corollaries with more accuracy than that from the single sensor. When one part or several parts of the system cannot operate normally, the information fusion technology could keep the system working well according to the information data collected from the other parts of the system. Due to the overlap and synergy among a variety of sensors, the information fusion could obtain as much data in the time and space domain, which means that the sampler info will be covered more widely and the object will be described more comprehensively. In order to ensure the credibility of the information, the information fusion technology describes the same object in multiple dimensions. The information fusion technology does not require much to the sensors. As a result, the sensors could be designed and installed in a flexible way. The distributing structure of the information fusion technology preprocesses the sounding data to generate tracking information and then make a global judgement in the center [47]. The structure of the information fusion is shown in Figure 10.  
[PERSON] [48] describes a detailed case of the information fusion between the VTS (Vessels Traffic System) and the AIS (Automatic Identification System) to indicate the importance of the characteristics in the IoV system. As parts of the IoV system, the VTS system and AIS system have their own functions and facilities. In the VTS system, the radar is the main facility to collect the information and data. Therefore, most characteristics of the VTS system are similar to that of the radar. Generally, the VTS  
Figure 10: The distributing structure of the information fusion technology. Figure 9: The architecture of the Exhibition Layer. system has accuracy in monitoring and tracking the ship moving status information, while it has great error in the location determination. In addition, the VTS system has a good extension to fuse a lot of of heterogeneous information. The AIS system is a network system to exchange and share the navigational information between different ships through the VHF link. Based on the maritime mobile service identity, the AIS system could track various ships separately and get their inherent information including the type, the size and the tonnage accurately. The AIS system also has the ability to get the ships' dynamic information including the location, speeds and navigational status information. As a result, the information fusion technology could fuse the advantages of these two different systems in the fusion center. The AIS system could help improve the location information accuracy of the VTS system, while the VTS system makes full use of its own advantages on capturing and tracking the dynamic information. On the other hand, the AIS system should be mounted on the ships, so it has a high requirement on the equipment. The VTS system just uses the radar to gain the information of ships, which does not rely on the terminals. With the help of the information fusion technology, the IoV system will be efficient and well managed. The Kalman algorithm method [49] is used in the information fusion of VTS and AIS.