UAV Aided Network Association in Space-Air-Ground Communication Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperating with satellites and base stations (BSs) constitute a space-air-ground three-tier heterogeneous network, which is beneficial in terms of both providing the seamless coverage as well as of improving the capacity for the users. However, cross-tier interference may be inevitable among these tightly embraced heterogeneous networks. In our paper, we propose a two-stage joint hovering altitude and power control solution for the resource allocation problem. Furthermore, Lagrange dual decomposition and concave-convex procedure (CCP) method are used to solve this problem. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed two-stage joint optimization algorithm in terms of UAV network's total throughput.