Abstract. Maritime study sites utilized as a physical experimental test bed for sensor data fusion, communication technology and data stream analysis tools can provide substantial frameworks for design and development of e-navigation technologies. Increasing safety by observation and monitoring of the maritime environment by new technologies meets forward-looking needs to facilitate situational awareness. Further, such test beds offer a solid basis for standardizing new technologies to advance growth by reducing time to market of up-to-date industrial products and technologies. Especially optical sensor technologies are well suited to provide a situational and marine environmental assessment of waterways for (i) online detection of relevant situations, (ii) collection of data for further analysis and (iii) reuse of data, e.g. for training or testing of assistant systems. The test bed set-up has to consider maintainability, flexibility and extensibility for efficient test set-ups. This means that new use cases and applications within the test bed infrastructure, here presented by a research port, can be easily developed and extended by installing new sensors, actuators and software components. Furthermore, the system supports reliable remote communication between onshore and offshore participants. A series of in situ experiments at the research port of Bremerhaven and in other maritime environments were performed, representing applications and scenarios to demonstrate the capability for the proposed system framework and design.