Shipping Lane-Aware Caching and Transmission Scheme for Maritime Wireless Networks

The shipping lane is one of the most important information of vessels, which is useful in maritime communications. This paper presents a cache-enabled maritime communication network architecture where the shipborne base stations with the cache storages serve as the relay points between the user ships and the shore based networks. Under this architecture, we promote the total network throughput by exploiting the specific characteristics of the maritime shipping lane information. In particular, we use the shipping lanes to calculate the large-scale channel state information (CSI) and predict the future user associations. We propose a shipping lane aware cross-layer resource allocation algorithm to optimize the system throughput in terms of the caching strategy, power allocation and bandwidth allocation, which is a mix-integer non-convex programming problem. We divide the original problem into a capacity optimization problem and a caching placement problem. The capacity optimization problem is relaxed into a large-scale-CSI-only convex problem and solved by Lagrangian dual method. The caching placement problem is solved by a greedy algorithm. The numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the shipping lane information in optimizing the system throughput compared with the existing algorithms.