LAPS-and-D2D Enabled Maritime Emergency Communications: Deployment Optimization and Resource Management

This paper investigates the application of low altitude platform station (LAPS) and device-to-device (D2D) techniques in maritime emergency communications. The hovering LAPS acts as an aerial base station to provide emergency telecommunications services, and the D2D technique is used to improve spectrum utilization. To make full use of the advantages of LAPS-and-D2D enabled networks, we formulate a sum rate maximization problem by jointly considering the deployment optimization and resource management (DORM). The formulated problem is constrained by the reliability and minimum capacity requirements. To solve this problem, an iterative optimization algorithm (IOA) is designed. First, by using the graphical method, the closed-form solution of optimal power allocation is derived. Next, we transform the spectrum reuse problem into a min-cost max-flow problem, and the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm is employed to solve it. Then, we present a meta-heuristic algorithm to optimize the LAPS deployment. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the proposed DORM scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art works in term of the sum rate. In addition, the convergence and performance gap of the designed IOA are demonstrated.