Collaborative USV-Buoy Enabled Maritime Wireless Networks: Cache-Aided Beamforming and Trajectory Design

To cope with the unendurable delay of maritime wireless networks (MWNs), this paper proposes a collaborative transmission framework utilizing a multi-antenna uncrewed surface vessel (USV) and multiple cache-aided buoys to satisfy the on-demand file requirements for remote users (RUs). Specifically, a direct transmission scheme is adopted for hit-requested files and a multi-hop transmission scheme is devised to handle cache misses. To fully exploit the local cache and signal processing capabilities, we integrate two schemes into a collaborative transmission framework, where the USV dynamically supports buoys in uncached file fetching, and buoys collaborate to forward both cached and fetched files to RUs through a cooperative beamforming policy. We aim to minimize the overall transmission completion time by jointly optimizing the USV trajectory, cooperative beamforming, and transmission duration under the constraints of USV kinetic, transmit power, and file requirements. By leveraging the completion condition analysis, the original problem is transformed into a sequence of one-slot problems and a finite-horizon problem, where the closed-form solution for the local caching beamforming at each buoy is derived. Due to the complexity of the multivariable coupling, we propose an equivalent rate transformation method for transmission strategy design. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and algorithm.