Multi-UAV Enabled Maritime Relay Communication and Service Content Migration

Collaborative unmanned vehicles affiliated with terrestrial or shipboard edge-stations with certain spectrums serving as a maritime relay platform have drawn more attentions. This paper focuses on the service migration orienting the costal ship broadband communication requirement supported by base stations and designs a multi-relay system. The multi-relay system is consist of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and features content buffering and network encoding functions. Thanks to the capability of flexible storage and seamless integration with the flight control system, buffer can better facilitate the role of UAV-relay and -edge computing. And network encoding not only enhances the data-carrying capacity and reduce the forwarding rounds, but also can better slim down the data to be transmitted and alleviate the pressure on buffer. Correspondingly, a maritime communication model is proposed based on network encoding and multi-UAV-associated relay. Subsequently, a container migration algorithm based on UAV geo-position and resource information is proposed to adapt to the arbitrary velocities and navigation directions of ships. Numerous results testify the advantages of our proposed algorithm in terms of transmission rate, service migration efficiency and energy consumption.