Collaborative multiple access and energy-efficient resource allocation in distributed maritime wireless networks

With the rapid increasing of maritime activities, maritime wireless networks (MWNs) with high reliability, high energy efficiency, and low delay are required. However, the centralized networking with fixed resource scheduling is not suitable for MWNs due to the special environment. In this paper, we introduce the collaborative relay communication in distributed MWNs to improve the link reliability, and propose an orthogonal time-frequency resource block reservation based multiple access (RRMA) scheme for both one-hop direct link and two-hop collaborative relay link to reduce the interference. To further improve the network performance, we formulate an energy efficiency (EE) maximization resource allocation problem and solve it by an iterative algorithm based on the Dinkelbach method. Finally, numerical results are provided to investigate the proposed RRMA scheme and resource allocation algorithm, showing that the low outage probability and transmission delay can be attained by the proposed RRMA scheme. Moreover, the proposed resource allocation algorithm is capable of achieving high EE in distributed MWNs.