Overview
ISO 23807:2023 - Ships and marine technology - General requirements for the asynchronous time‑insensitive ship‑shore data transmission - defines functional requirements for reliably exchanging non‑real‑time data between shipboard and on‑shore data servers. The standard focuses on asynchronous, time‑insensitive transfers (file and message-based), methods to measure end‑to‑end communication quality, transport integrity and security, transmission management, and communication optimization. It specifies what is required, not low‑level protocol implementations.
Key topics and technical requirements
- Asynchronous communication: Supports time‑insensitive exchanges where producer and consumer operate at different times; message queueing and similar patterns (MQTT is referenced).
- End‑to‑end quality measurement: Requirements for assessing delivery success and transport quality across ship–shore links.
- Transport integrity and security: Requirements for encryption, authentication and authorization to protect data in transit. The document references contemporary transport/security options (e.g., TLS 1.3, AES and AEAD algorithms such as AES‑GCM or ChaCha20‑Poly1305) as examples of mechanisms.
- Transmission management: Prioritization, logging, carrier awareness/management and monitoring to control when and how data is sent from vessels.
- Optimization techniques: Deduplication, compression, resume on interrupt, multiplexing and on‑demand requests to improve efficiency over variable, unstable maritime links.
- Data transport agent & asynchronous data management agent: Defines the roles and interfaces for vessel‑side and shore‑side agents, folder/file sync, file move semantics, SMB/HTTP file I/O and APIs for control and monitoring.
- Operational features: Size restrictions, delayed transmission, resume/recovery, carrier status awareness and monitoring.
- Normative/reference protocols and annexes: ISO/IEC 20922 (MQTT) is referenced; Annexes include correlation charts, agent functions and HTTP file I/O examples.
Note: ISO 23807 excludes identity management of data producers/consumers, communication equipment specifications and carrier performance (bandwidth/latency) requirements.
Applications and who uses it
- Ship operators and fleet managers: For robust transfer of logs, sensor dumps, images and maintenance files between vessels and shore.
- System integrators and software vendors: Building data transport agents, asynchronous data management platforms, and cloud/on‑premise ship‑shore gateways.
- Shipyards and equipment manufacturers: Enabling remote diagnostics, firmware and condition monitoring data exchange.
- Maritime IT/cloud providers and SREs: Designing secure, resilient ship‑shore data pipelines that handle intermittent connectivity.
Practical use cases include remote equipment troubleshooting, scheduled bulk telemetry uploads, shore‑based analytics ingestion, and supporting e‑Navigation and Maritime Single Window workflows.
Related standards
- ISO 19847 / ISO 19848 - onboard data collection and storage (related application standards)
- ISO/IEC 20922 (MQTT) - message queueing reference
ISO 23807 provides the functional framework to standardize asynchronous ship‑shore exchanges, helping maritime stakeholders design secure, efficient and resilient data transfer solutions.
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