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With the growing maritime economy, ensuring the quality of communication for maritime users has become imperative. The maritime communication system based on nearshore base stations enhances the communication rate of maritime users through dynamic resource allocation. A virtual queue-based deep reinforcement learning beam allocation scheme is proposed in this paper, aiming to maximize the communication rate. More particularly, to reduce the complexity of resource management, we employ a grid-based method to discretize the maritime environment. For the combinatorial optimization problem of grid and beam allocation under unknown channel state information, we model it as a sequential decision process of resource allocation. The nearshore base station is modeled as a learning agent, continuously interacting with the environment to optimize beam allocation schemes using deep reinforcement learning techniques. Furthermore, we guarantee that grids with poor channel state information can be serviced through the virtual queue method. Finally, the simulation results provided show that our proposed beam allocation scheme is beneficial in terms of increasing the communication rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of ad hoc networks, which enable flexible and dynamic network establishment only by mobile terminals equipped with wireless communication devices, has recently attracted attention for the coming IoT era. Although the nature of ad hoc networks shows the advantages of their autonomous and distributed network management, a manifestation of drawbacks owing to the nature of wireless communication and the mobility of terminals are inevitable. Many routing protocols have already been proposed to address the issues by adapting to nature and achieving a certain level of improvement. However, the routing protocols still suffer from difficulties in information collection for routing and adaptive route management during communication. Moreover, there is another issue that end pair-based routing procedures prevent other end pairs from reusing the routing information effectively. To address the drawbacks of conventional routing protocols, this paper proposes VORTEX, a novel routing protocol that employs an opportunistic routing strategy using hierarchization. One of the characteristic features of VORTEX is its network-driven opportunistic forwarding, in which packets travel toward destination terminals using hierarchy as a guide without conventional route discovery procedures. Moreover, another characteristic feature of VORTEX is that the hierarchical structure also contributes to adapting to communication environment changes in an autonomous manner. In other words, VORTEX enables flexible network-wide information-based routing only with the locally collected information. The simulation results show that the proposed VORTEX could provide better service quality and reliability with improved efficiency compared to the conventional routing protocols. Furthermore, the most significant contribution is not only in the communication performance but also VORTEX omits route discovery or route maintenance from routing protocols, and formed networks themselves have a function to deliver packets toward destination terminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]