Beyond GMDSS: Goal-Oriented Communication and Resilient State Estimation for Proactive Maritime Risk Assessment

Abstract

GMDSS is designed primarily for distress alerting and response, whereas future maritime operations increasingly require communication before a situation becomes critical. This paper investigates whether proactive collision-risk assessment must rely on continuous high-rate state reporting, or whether receiver-side prediction can reduce the communication demand. A common two-vessel encounter is evaluated in four simulations. First, event-triggered reporting exposes the communication--prediction trade-off. Second, a risk-adaptive policy allocates approximately the same communication budget more effectively than periodic or residual-only reporting. Third, a primary-link outage shows that receiver-side prediction provides temporal resilience, while heterogeneous terrestrial and satellite bearers provide communication diversity. Fourth, a spoofing-like navigation drift demonstrates that prediction cannot compensate for corrupted input; an independent terrestrial A-PNT observation detects and bounds the error. The results support a goal-oriented architecture in which communication depends on prediction error, operational risk, link availability, and information integrity rather than on a fixed reporting rate.