Beam-Hopping-Based Resource Allocation in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

The integrated satellite-terrestrial network (ISTN) provides a promising solution to achieve high-data-rate and ubiquitous connectivity in next-generation communication networks. Considering the scarce spectrum resources and unevenly distributed traffic demands, we investigate the resource allocation algorithms for ISTNs, where the beam-hopping (BH)-based satellite system and terrestrial systems share the same frequency band. Taking advantage of the scheduling flexibility of BH technology, the dynamical protection zones are constructed to avoid co-channel interference and improve the spectrum efficiency. Since both spectrum efficiency and user fairness are the key optimization indexes in practical systems, two resource allocation problems are formulated to maximize the weighted sum of capacity (MWSC) and maximize the minimum capacity-to-demand ratio (MMCDR) of ISTNs, respectively. By reformulating the problems as mixed-integer linear programming problems, optimal solutions are obtained. To reduce the computational complexity, two greedy suboptimal algorithms are proposed for the MWSC and MMCDR, respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve higher spectrum efficiency and guarantee fairness between the satellite and terrestrial systems. It is also shown that both the greedy algorithms perform similarly to the optimal algorithms while having much lower complexity.