Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Aided Hybrid Two-Tier Maritime Edge Computing Networks

The rapid development of maritime networks has led to the emergence of various maritime applications, especially those computing-intensive and delay-sensitive services. Due to the limited computing and communication resource in maritime networks, how to improve the quality of service (QoS) of mar-itime applications is challenging issue. To this end, we propose unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided hybrid two-tier maritime edge computing networks. In underwater tier, underwater wireless sensors (UWSs) collect oceanic data and upload data to unmanned surface vehicle (USV) via acoutic transmission. Each USV is responsible for receiving data from UWSs and performing local computing. In sea surface tier, each USV can offload partial workloads to multi-UAV via radio channel for aerial computing. We formulate a joint optimization problem to optimize the offloading decision and transmission duration, with the objective of minimizing the energy consumption of USV and UWSs. Simulation results demonstrate advantages of our proposed scheme.