Load Balancing Mechanisms of Unmanned Surface Vehicle Cluster Based on Marine Vehicular Fog Computing

The unmanned surface vehicle (USV) cluster, during marine task execution, works in a challenging communication environment. The cluster's network topology and states of wireless channel change rapidly with time. And the computing resources of fog nodes may be shared by several task requests simultaneously. Therefore, it's necessary to find an effective load balancing mechanism to cope with the ever-changing adverse factors. The load balancing problems of vehicular fog computing of USV cluster are investigated in this work. And furthermore, the corresponding mathematical models, including marine vehicular fog computing networks, wireless channels, and several typical scheduling mechanisms, are established. The analytical models and simulation results show that the proposed scheduling algorithm based on minimum response time performs better than other selected algorithms and can significantly reduce the response time and blocking probability of task requests.