Joint Optimization of Trajectory and Power Allocation for USV-Assisted Maritime Wireless Network

Abstract

Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have attracted significant interest recently in maritime wireless communication. This paper studies a USV-assisted maritime wireless network where the USV is employed to support the communication connection between the terrestrial base station (TBS) and ship. Considering the maritime environment characteristic and earth curvature, we establish a systematic USV kinetics and information transmission model. An expected throughput maximization problem is then formulated, where the USV trajectory and power allocation are jointly considered, subject to the constraints of kinematics, safe sailing, line-of-sight (LoS) link distances, power allocation, and information-causality. Due to the complexity of the maritime two-ray signal propagation model, we propose a channel approximation method to find the upper bound of the throughput. The problem is solved by using problem decomposition, successive convex approximation, and interior-point methods. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method and show that the adoption of USV by the maritime wireless network can significantly improve communication performance.