The Internet of underwater things (IoUT) is envisioned to be an essential part of maritime activities. Given the IoUT devices' wide-area distribution and constrained transmit power, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been widely adopted for collecting and forwarding the data sensed by IoUT devices to the surface-stations. In order to accommodate the diverse requirements of IoUT applications, it is imperative to conceive a multi-tier underwater computing (MTUC) framework by carefully harnessing both the computing and the communications as well as the storage resources of both the surface-station and of the AUVs as well as of the IoUT devices. Furthermore, to meet the stringent energy constraints of the IoUT devices and to reduce the operating cost of the MTUC framework, a joint environment-aware AUV trajectory design and resource management problem is formulated, which is a high-dimensional NP-hard problem. To tackle this challenge, we first transform the problem into a Markov decision process (MDP) and solve it with the aid of the asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) algorithm. Our simulation results demonstrate the superiority of our scheme.
翻译:水下物体的互联网(IOUT)被认为是海洋活动的一个基本部分。鉴于IOUT装置的广域分布和受限制的传输动力,已广泛采用自主水下飞行器(AUVs)来收集和将IOUT装置所感测的数据传送到地面站,为了适应IOUT应用的各种要求,必须设想一个多层水下计算框架(MTUC),认真利用地面站和AVs以及IOUT装置的计算和通信以及储存资源。此外,为了满足IOUT装置的严格能源限制,并降低MTUC框架的操作成本,制定了一个环境觉察AUV轨迹设计和资源管理联合问题,这是一个高分辨率NP-硬问题。为了应对这一挑战,我们首先将这一问题转变为Markov决策过程(MDP),并在无同步优势的演员-critic(A3C)系统(A3C)的辅助下加以解决。我们的模拟结果显示了我们计划的优越性。