Joint Multi-Domain Resource Allocation and Trajectory Optimization in UAV-Assisted Maritime IoT Networks

The integration of Maritime Internet of Things (M-IoT) technology and unmanned aerial/surface vehicles (UAVs/USVs) has been emerging as a promising navigational information technique in intelligent ocean systems. In this article, we consider the UAV-assisted M-IoT network where USVs offload computation-intensive maritime tasks via non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to the UAV equipped with the mobile-edge computing (MEC) server subject to the UAV mobility. To improve the energy efficiency of offloading transmission and workload computation, we focus on minimizing the total energy consumption by jointly optimizing the USVs’ offloaded workload, transmit power, computation resource allocation, as well as the UAV trajectory subject to the USVs’ latency requirements. Despite the nature of mixed discrete and non-convex programming of the formulated problem, we exploit the vertical decomposition and propose a two-layered algorithm for solving it efficiently. Specifically, the top-layered algorithm is proposed to solve the problem of optimizing the UAV trajectory based on the idea of deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and the underlying algorithm is proposed to optimize the underlying multidomain resource allocation problem based on the idea of the Lagrangian multiplier method. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms as well as the performance advantage of NOMA-enabled computation offloading in terms of overall energy consumption.