The rapid growth of maritime communication networks introduces significant challenges to routing optimization, arising from large-scale network topologies, highly dynamic node mobility, and stringent real-time communication requirements. Conventional routing algorithms often exhibit limited scalability and poor adaptability when facing frequent topology variations. The routing problem is modeled as a multi-agent distributed decision-making process, where each node acts as an autonomous agent. In this paper, we propose a graph-partitioned hierarchical graph representation learning framework (GP-HGRL) for scalable and continual routing optimization in dynamic maritime networks. By explicitly modeling the network as a time-evolving graph, GP-HGRL first partitions the global topology into topology-aware subgraphs, enabling distributed learning and inference with reduced computational complexity. A hierarchical graph neural network architecture is then developed to jointly capture intra-subgraph local structures and inter-subgraph global dependencies, producing topology-aware embeddings for routing decision-making. Based on the learned representations, a deep reinforcement learning policy is employed to perform distributed next-hop routing decisions. To effectively handle topology dynamics induced by node mobility and link variations, we further introduce a continual graph learning mechanism that selectively updates representations and routing policies only within affected subgraphs, thereby avoiding costly global retraining and preserving routing stability. Extensive simulations demonstrate that GP-HGRL consistently outperforms shortest-path routing and existing reinforcement learning-based approaches in terms of packet delivery ratio, retransmission rate, packet loss, and training efficiency under various network loads and dynamic conditions.
Sun et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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