A Voyage-Based Cooperative Resource Allocation Scheme in Maritime Broadband Access Network

Increasing marine activities taking place within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) have made broadband maritime communications very attractive in recent years. In this paper, a coordinated satellite and terrestrial (II-CST) architecture is presented to enable real-time and broadband Internet access within the EEZ. Further, a voyage-based resource allocation scheme is proposed to dynamically adapt the system resource consumption corresponding with the user load. We make switching plans for shipborne base stations (S-BSs) considering the proportion of blocked users and changes in user distribution to recover broadband access and reduce inter-cell interference at sea, and take the sailing position of accessed users as a constraint to cooperatively adjust the downlink power of S-BSs. Simulation results under real ship data of China's Yellow Sea show that under the II-CST architecture, our resource allocation scheme can effectively improve the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of users, reduce the number of handover-related link failures, and reduce the power consumption of S-BSs.