A Survey on UAV-Aided Maritime Communications: Deployment Considerations, Applications, and Future Challenges

TLDR

Maritime activities drive economic growth and emerging IoT use cases, but reliable broadband coverage is limited by shore‑based base stations and high‑latency satellite links, prompting interest in UAV‑aided wireless connectivity. This survey reviews the state of the art in UAV‑aided maritime communications, focusing on conventional optimization and machine‑learning approaches. It examines UAV network architectures, physical‑layer, resource management, cloud/edge computing, caching, and trajectory optimization, and discusses future challenges such as NOMA, swarm learning, and 6G integration. The survey presents experimental deployments and implementation details, and identifies key open issues and future research directions for UAV‑aided maritime communications.

Abstract

Maritime activities represent a major domain of economic growth with several emerging maritime Internet of Things use cases, such as smart ports, autonomous navigation, and ocean monitoring systems. The major enabler for this exciting ecosystem is the provision of broadband, low-delay, and reliable wireless coverage to the ever-increasing number of vessels, buoys, platforms, sensors, and actuators. Towards this end, the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in maritime communications introduces an aerial dimension to wireless connectivity going above and beyond current deployments, which are mainly relying on shore-based base stations with limited coverage and satellite links with high latency. Considering the potential of UAV-aided wireless communications, this survey presents the state-of-the-art in UAV-aided maritime communications, which, in general, are based on both conventional optimization and machine-learning-aided approaches. More specifically, relevant UAV-based network architectures are discussed together with the role of their building blocks. Then, physical-layer, resource management, and cloud/edge computing and caching UAV-aided solutions in maritime environments are discussed and grouped based on their performance targets. Moreover, as UAVs are characterized by flexible deployment with high re-positioning capabilities, studies on UAV trajectory optimization for maritime applications are thoroughly discussed. In addition, aiming at shedding light on the current status of real-world deployments, experimental studies on UAV-aided maritime communications are presented and implementation details are given. Finally, several important open issues in the area of UAV-aided maritime communications are given, related to the integration of sixth generation (6G) advancements. These future challenges include physical-layer aspects, non-orthogonal multiple access schemes, radical learning paradigms for swarms of UAVs and unmanned surface and underwater vehicles, as well as UAV-aided edge computing and caching.