This book shares valuable insights into high-efficiency data transmission scheduling and into a group intelligent search and rescue approach for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered maritime networks. Its goal is to highlight major research directions and topics that are critical for those who are interested in maritime communication networks, equipping them to carry out further research in this field.

The authors begin with a historical overview and address the marine business, emerging technologies, and the shortcomings of current network architectures (coverage, connectivity, reliability, etc.). In turn, they introduce a heterogeneous space/air/sea/ground maritime communication network architecture and investigate the transmission scheduling problem in maritime communication networks, together with solutions based on deep reinforcement learning. To accommodate the computation demands of maritime communication services, the authors propose a multi-vessel offloading algorithm for maritime mobile edge computing networks. In closing, they discuss the applications of swarm intelligence in maritime search and rescue.