Reputation-Aware Rate Maximization for Cross-Media Cooperative Transmission in Smart Ocean IoT

Abstract

In smart ocean Internet of Things (IoT) systems, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are responsible for underwater information collection. Due to the nature of the medium of water, the acoustic communications for AUVs are of low bandwidth and adverse environmental conditions causing severe transmission problems. In order to realize cross-media transmission from AUVs to the offshore platform, unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have been suggested to forward the collected information in a coordinated manner. Against this backdrop, this contribution develops a cooperative USV-to-USV (U2U) cross-media cooperative communications scheme. Then, we formulate a rate maximization problem with the objective of optimizing the reputation-aware USV selection strategy. Furthermore, to characterize the impact of the mobility of AUVs/USVs, a long-term dynamic process is constructed. Meanwhile, we also develop an efficient algorithm which transforms the reputation-aided dynamic USVs selection problem into the infinite time horizon average one restricted by time average rate constraints in the collection of penalty processes with the help of the Lyapunov optimization framework and drift-plus-penalty method. Finally, numerical results are presented to validate the convergence behavior and the performance for the designed dynamic USVs selection algorithm.