Multi-Vessel Computation Offloading in Maritime Mobile Edge Computing Network

With the development of the maritime networks, the data of vessel users is growing exponentially, more and more resource intensive tasks, such as multimedia applications, high-definition video playback and games, appear in the daily demands. These changes have greatly increased the energy consumption and bandwidth requirements of vessel terminals and networks. In order to meet the requirements of high bandwidth and low delay for the high-speed development of mobile network, and reduce the network load, the concept of mobile edge computing (MEC) is proposed and has been widely supported by the academia and industry. It is considered to be one of the key technologies of the next generation networks. Inspired by this idea, this paper introduces computing offloading technology to maritime mobile cloud networks. Maritime mobile cloud network is the product of the continuous development of cloud computing technology and mobile Internet technology. In this article, we studied the issue of computation task offloading for vessel terminals, focusing on minimizing the energy consumption of vessel terminals and the execution delay of computation task. Firstly, it determines that whether if it should be offloaded to the cloud server. Secondly, the server should be selected to run the computation task. The goal of the optimization is to minimize the energy consumption of vessel terminals and the execution delay of computation task taking into account of different weights. To reduce the execution latency and device energy consumption, we proposed a multi-vessel computation offloading algorithm based on improved Hungarian algorithm in maritime mobile edge computing network. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.