Joint Optimization of Trajectory and Communication Resource Allocation for Unmanned Surface Vehicle Enabled Maritime Wireless Networks

Abstract

In maritime wireless communications, unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can improve coverage and transmission performance due to their agile maneuverability and flexible deployment. This paper considers a USV-enabled maritime wireless network, where a USV is employed to assist the communication between the terrestrial base station and ships. Considering the maritime environment characteristics and earth curvature, we establish the systematic USV kinetics and information transmission models. To guarantee fairness, we aim to maximize the minimum expected throughput overall ships by jointly optimizing the trajectory and communication resource allocation, subject to the constraints of the USV kinetics, safe sailing, breakpoint distances, line-of-sight links, resource allocation, and information-causality. Due to the complexity of the maritime two-ray signal propagation model, we propose a channel approximation method to find an upper bound of the throughput for the original problem. By the problem decomposition, two sub-problems are derived and solved iteratively using successive convex approximation and interior-point methods. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that USV can significantly improve transmission performance in maritime wireless networks.