VESBELT: An energy-efficient and low-latency aware task offloading in Maritime Internet-of-Things networks using ensemble neural networks

Due to increasing maritime activities, the number of Maritime Internet-of-things (MIoT) devices requiring real-time marine data processing is growing exponentially. To offload maritime tasks and address the limited computational capabilities of heterogeneous MIoT devices, edge and cloud computing networks are employed. However, these networks introduce several challenges, including increased energy consumption and service latency within the complex marine network environment. Current state-of-the-art solutions address these issues by focusing exclusively on real-time offloading data, neglecting the relationship with past offloading tasks. In this work, we develop an optimization framework, named VESBELT, for offloading tasks from V essel users to nearby E dge S ervers or the cloud server, aiming to reduce E nergy consumption and service L atency T rade-off through a multi-objective linear programming problem. However, finding optimal solutions from this formulation is considered an NP-hard problem. To address this, we introduce VESBELT-ECNN, VESBELT-EANN, and VESBELT-ELSTM systems that leverage ensemble convolutional, artificial neural networks and Long- short-term memory, respectively, to achieve solutions in polynomial time. The developed ensemble models integrate multiple combinations of deep learning models and exploit the pre-trained models to provide realtime solutions with better prediction accuracy. The experimental findings, obtained using Python programming version 3.10.2, indicate that the proposed VESBELT-ECNN, VESBELT-EANN, and VESBELT-ELSTM systems outperform existing approaches in terms of user Quality of Experience (QoE) in the timeliness domain and energy savings.