MAGI: A Low-Cost IoT Architecture for Distributed AIS-Based Vessel Monitoring and Maritime Emissions Assessment in Panama

Real-time vessel tracking and environmental assessment in developing regions face significant challenges due to the high cost and proprietary constraints of commercial Automatic Identification System (AIS) services. We introduce MAGI, an open-source, low-cost, IoT-distributed architecture that integrates Orange Pi 5 edge nodes with software-defined radio (SDR) AIS receivers and containerized microservices to capture, preprocess, and stream AIS messages. During a ten-day field campaign in Panama, our decentralized deployment processed over 500,000 AIS transmissions, achieving 99% uptime and delivering vessel position and speed updates with sub-second latency. Based on the collected data, we also evaluated system scalability, energy consumption, and per node cost, demonstrating that a complete coastal network can be deployed for under USD 1200 per site. These results confirm that MAGI is a scalable, secure, and affordable IoT solution for AIS-based vessel tracking and environmental monitoring in resource-constrained settings.