UAV-aided Two-tier Computation Offloading for Marine Communication Networks: An Incentive-based Approach

With the rapid growth of marine services and applications for achieving smart oceans, advanced marine communication networks have attracted increasing interests. However, the limited resources constrain the applications in marine communication networks. In this paper, we investigate a two-tier computation offloading scheme for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aided marine communication networks via game theory to improve offloading efficiency. Specifically, these underwater wireless sensors (UWSs) are deployed at the seafloor, which partially offloads their sensed information to unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for assist computing. USV acts as a relay to offload part of its data to UAVs. We formulate three optimization problems to optimize the utility of UWSs, USVs, and UAVs, respectively. To address the formulated problems, we propose efficient algorithms to derive the solutions, which can maximize the utility of each participant. Finally, simulations are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms, and the results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in comparison with the benchmark schemes.