Exploiting the Shipping Lane Information for Energy-Efficient Maritime Communications

Energy efficiency is a crucial issue for maritime communications, due to the high path loss and limited number 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 of marine users to estimate their large-scale channel state information. Based on that, the resource allocation is jointly optimized for all users over all time slots during the voyage, which is 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.