DRL-Based Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in Green MEC-Enabled Maritime-IoT Networks

The maritime Internet of Things (MIoT), a maritime version of the Internet of Things (IoT), is envisioned as a promising solution that can provide ubiquitous connectivity over land and sea. Due to the rapid development of maritime activities and the maritime economy, there is a growing demand for computing-intensive and latency-sensitive maritime applications requiring various energy consumption, communication, and computation resources, posing a significant challenge to MIoT devices due to their limited computational ability and battery capacity. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), which can handle computation tasks at the network’s edge more efficiently and with less latency, is emerging as a paradigm for fulfilling the ever-increasing demands of MIoT applications. However, the exponential increase in the number of MIoT devices has increased the system’s energy consumption, resulting in increased greenhouse gas emissions and a negative impact on the environment. As a result, it is vital for MIoT networks to take traditional energy usage minimization into account. The integration of renewable energy-harvesting capabilities into base stations or MIoT devices possesses the potential to reduce grid energy consumption and carbon emissions. However, making an effective decision regarding task offloading and resource allocation is crucial for maximizing the utilization of the system’s potential resources and minimizing carbon emissions. In this paper, we first propose a green MEC-enabled maritime IoT network architecture to flexibly provide computing-intensive and latency-sensitive applications for MIoT users. Based on the architecture, we formulate the joint task offloading and resource allocation problem by optimizing the total system execution efficiency (including the total size of completed tasks, task execution latency, and the system’s carbon emissions) and then propose a deep-deterministic-policy-gradient-based joint optimization strategy to solve the problem, eventually obtaining an effective resolution through continuous action space learning in the changing environment. Finally, simulation results confirm that our proposal can yield good performance in system execution efficiency compared to other benchmarks; that is, it can significantly reduce the system’s carbon emissions and tasks’ delay and improve the total size of completed tasks.