Generative AI-Enhanced Cooperative MEC of UAVs and Ground Stations for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel cooperative framework using generative AI-enhanced multi-agent reinforcement learning to optimize task offloading and UAV trajectories for supporting USVs in complex maritime scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a GAI-HAPPO algorithm that improves multi-agent reinforcement learning stability and adaptability in dynamic environments for USV support.

Findings

GAI-HAPPO outperforms benchmark methods in simulations.

Enhanced modeling of environment uncertainties.

Improved task completion times in complex scenarios.

Abstract

The increasing deployment of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) require computational support and coverage in applications such as maritime search and rescue. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can offer low-cost, flexible aerial services, and ground stations (GSs) can provide powerful supports, which can cooperate to help the USVs in complex scenarios. However, the collaboration between UAVs and GSs for USVs faces challenges of task uncertainties, USVs trajectory uncertainties, heterogeneities, and limited computational resources. To address these issues, we propose a cooperative UAV and GS based robust multi-access edge computing framework to assist USVs in completing computational tasks. Specifically, we formulate the optimization problem of joint task offloading and UAV trajectory to minimize the total execution time, which is in the form of mixed integer nonlinear programming and NP-hard to tackle. Therefore, we propose the algorithm of generative artificial intelligence-enhanced heterogeneous agent proximal policy optimization (GAI-HAPPO). The proposed algorithm integrates GAI models to enhance the actor network ability to model complex environments and extract high-level features, thereby allowing the algorithm to predict uncertainties and adapt to dynamic conditions. Additionally, GAI stabilizes the critic network, addressing the instability of multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing benchmark methods, thus highlighting the potentials in tackling intricate, cross-domain issues in the considered scenarios.