Two-Stage Offloading Optimization for Energy-Latency Tradeoff with Mobile Edge Computing in Maritime Internet of Things

The ever-increasing growth in maritime activities with large amounts of Maritime Internet-of-Things (M-IoT) devices and the exploration of ocean network leads to a great challenge for dealing with a massive amount of maritime data in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way. However, the resources-constrained maritime users cannot meet the high requirements of transmission delay and energy consumption, due to the excessive traffic and limited resources in maritime networks. To solve this problem, mobile edge computing is taken as a promising paradigm to help mobile devices from edge servers via computation offloading considering the different quality of service (QoS) with the complex ocean environments, resulting in energy saving and increased transmission latency. To investigate the tradeoff between latency and energy consumption in low-cost large-scale maritime communication, we formulate the offloading optimization problem and propose a two-stage joint optimal offloading algorithm, optimizing computation and communication resource allocation under limited energy and sensitive latency. At the first stage, the maritime users make the decision on whether to offload a computation considering their demands and environments. Then, the channel allocation and power allocation problems were proposed to optimize the offloading policy which coordinates with the center cloud servers at the second stage, considering the dynamic tradeoff of latency and energy consumption. Finally, numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.