Multi-vessel Computation Offloading in Maritime Mobile Edge Computing Network

Abstract

With the rapid development of maritime communication networks, applications data of ship users has been growing exponentially, more and more resource-intensive tasks (e.g. multimedia applications, high-definition video playback, and online games) appear in daily life. New applications have enormously increased the energy consumption of ship terminals and network bandwidth requirements. To satisfy the requirements of high bandwidth and low latency for great-leap forward development and lighten the workload of mobile networks, the concept of MEC has been proposed and received extensive support from academia and industry, which is considered as one of the key technologies of next generation networks. Illuminated by this idea, this chapter presents computation offloading technology into maritime communication networks. In this chapter, we study the issue of computation offloading for computation-intensive tasks, which focuses on minimizing energy consumption of vessel terminals and time delay of computation-intensive tasks. At first, it determines whether a computation-intensive task should be offloading to a cloud server. Then, it should determine which server executes the computation-intensive task.