Airborne Internet: An Ultradense LEO Networks Empowered Satellite-to-Aircraft Access and Resource Management Approach

With the rapid development of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite technologies and constellation projects (like Starlink and OneWeb), the ongoing ultradense LEO satellite networks can provide an efficient solution to ubiquitous connection of aircraft. It is urgent to design the ultradense LEO-network-enabled satellite-to-aircraft communication for in-cabin users with high-speed Internet connectivity requirements. In this article, we investigate the resource scheduling of ultradense LEO-network-enabled satellite-to-aircraft communication and the in-cabin communication inside aircraft in civil aviation. First, we adopt the Lyapunov optimization framework to tackle the high dynamic and fast mobility of satellites and aircraft. For the satellite-to-aircraft access and subchannel assignment, we propose a dynamic access and subchannel allocation algorithm based on the matching theory, which can converge to a stable matching within a finite iterations. To guarantee customized needs of in-cabin users, we propose a power control algorithm based on the successive convex approximation technology to optimize the power allocation of satellites on each subchannel and the transmit power of aircraft for each in-cabin user, which is proven to obtain a saddle point or a local minimum with low complexity. Extensive simulations have been carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation method.