High Altitude Platforms-Assisted Hierarchical Computing Offloading in Marine-IoT Networks: A Delay Minimization Approach

Mobile edge computing has been a promising technology that enables diverse applications of computation-intensive yet latency-sensitive in marine Internet of Things networks. In this paper, we propose a framework of hierarchical computing offloading with the assistance of high altitude platforms (HAPs), and a hybrid transmission scheme of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA) is designed for achieving efficient computation offloading. Specifically, the offshore sensing devices (SDs) initially perform computation offloading to the HAPs by forming NOMA groups, and the HAPs further offload partial workload to the onshore base station (BS) via FDMA. For efficient calculation, we aim to minimize the overall delay in completing all the workload processing of these SDs by jointly optimizing the durations of NOMA and FDMA transmission as well as the hierarchical computation offloading workload. Though the problem is in the form of non-convexity, we design an efficient SCA-based algorithm to tackle it. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the optimality and convergence of the proposed algorithm, as well as the performance gains of the proposed scheme.