Exploiting the Shipping Lane Information for Energy-Efficient Maritime Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to maritime communication energy efficiency by leveraging shipping lane data to optimize resource allocation over entire voyages, significantly reducing power consumption.

Contribution

It presents a new method that exploits shipping lane information to estimate large-scale channel states and jointly optimize resource allocation over long periods, which was not addressed in prior work.

Findings

Significant power reduction compared to existing methods.

Effective long-term resource optimization using shipping lane data.

Convex reformulation enables efficient solution of the optimization problem.

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for maritime communications, due to the limitation of geographically available base station sites. Different from previous studies, we promote the energy efficiency by exploiting the specific characteristics of maritime channels and user mobility. Particularly, we utilize the shipping lane information to obtain the long-term position information of marine users, from which the large-scale channel state information is estimated. Based on that, the resource allocation is jointly optimized for all users and all time slots during the voyage, leading to a mixed 0-1 non-convex programming problem. We transform this problem into a convex one by means of variable substitution and time-sharing relaxation, and propose an iterative algorithm to solve it based on the Lagrangian dual decomposition method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the power consumption compared with existing approaches, due to the global optimization over a much larger time span by utilizing the shipping lane information.