Game Theoretical Incentive for USV Fleet-Assisted Data Sharing in Maritime Communication Networks
Hui Zeng, Zhou Su, Qichao Xu, Kuan Zhang, Qiang Ye
Abstract
With the rapid proliferations of maritime applications, the data demands of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) keep ever-increasing. However, due to limitations of resources (e.g., energy, storage, bandwidth, etc.) and high costs on data sharing, USVs do not provide data proactively, which hinders the efficiency of data sharing. To tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose a game based USV fleet-assisted data sharing scheme to enable data exchange among USVs. Specially, we firstly propose a data publish/subscribe framework, where USVs are categorized into publishers and subscribers, and a USV fleet is motivated as a broker to relay data from publishers to subscribers. Then, the optimal waypoints for data publishing are recommended to the USV fleet to improve its probability of acquiring data. Furthermore, a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) reverse auction game is utilized for data publishing, which ensures that the data publishers bid for USV fleets with own truthful costs, so as to avoid false bidding of data publishers. A double auction game is then employed for data subscription, which balances the benefits between the USV fleet and the data subscriber. An incentive-based data sharing algorithm is finally designed to obtain the optimal bidding strategies for all game parties including data publishers, USV fleets and data subscribers. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme efficiently increases the utilities of all participants, as compared to conventional schemes.