Collaborative Computation Offloading for UAVs and USV Fleets in Communication Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) empowered with artificial intelligence (AI) have become a new paradigm for marine monitoring and disaster rescue. In AI-enabled UAV applications, UAVs generate amounts of computation-intensive tasks (e.g., image recognition, video processing, and path planning, etc.) that cannot be locally executed by UAVs in time. How to offload the computation-intensive tasks of UAVs timely and effectively has become an urgent challenge. Multiple unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) integrated into a USV fleet is appealingly advocated to provide abundant computation resources for computation tasks. In this paper, we propose a collaborative computation offloading scheme with UAVs and USV fleets in maritime communication networks. Specifically, we first propose a collaborative computation offloading framework, where UAVs act as the requesters of computation offloading, and USV fleets are the assistants. Then, to minimize the overall execution time of computation tasks, UAVs determine the optimal ratio of compu-tation tasks offloaded to USV fleets in the worst case. Afterwards, the first sealed reverse auction with reserve price is utilized to incentivize USV fleets to assist in executing computation tasks of UAVs, where the reserve price guarantees the satisfied benefits of UAVs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme reduces the overall execution time and improves the expected revenue of the USV fleet as compared to conventional schemes.