On-Demand MEC Empowered UAV Deployment for 6G Time-Sensitive Maritime Internet of Things

With the emergence of sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication technologies, intelligent gadgets are expanding. Meanwhile, due to the fast rise of marine operations for trade, research, military, oil drilling, and recreational activities, the number of maritime internet-of-things (MIoT) devices is also expanding. On-demand deployment of multiaccess edge computing (MEC) empowered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to meet the network coverage demand for MIoT devices at the seaside is presented. The MEC-UAVs are considered as reliable, cost-effective, and efficient for deployment and service provision to MIoT devices. The network profit maximization on MEC-UAV deployment and effective service allocation to MIoT devices is investigated. A combinatorial optimization problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) is formulated, which is NP-hard. To deal with a complex problem, we propose a Bender decomposition (BD) algorithm. The BD decomposes the ILP into the master problem for MEC-UAVs deployment and subproblem for MIoT device association. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides the polynomial-time computational complexity and achieves a near-optimal solution.