Multi-Armed Bandits Scheme for Tasks Offloading in MEC-enabled Maritime Communication Networks

Driven by the advancement of science and technology, the issue of marine ship Internet of Things (IoT) users' assignment of computing tasks offloading has become more and more challenging. When faced with the complex and dynamic marine environment, considering the different quality requirements of maritime applications, we have addressed this issue in this paper. We first propose the space-air-ground-edge (SAGE) maritime communication network architecture. This novel architecture is used to offload computing-intensive applications and services for IoT users in the marine environment. At the same time, based on the Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) problem, considering budget constraints and other marine environmental conditions such as delay and energy consumption, we propose an algorithm for selecting an edge server strategy. Simulation results of this paper show that the scheme has a better performance under different quality of service (QoS) requirements, which proves that the scheme is effective.