Joint User Association, Power Optimization and Trajectory Control in an Integrated Satellite-Aerial-Terrestrial Network

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is being widely embraced with the number of connected devices growing rapidly. Moreover, IoT applications are emerging in diverse verticals such as connected cars, connected factories, and smart agriculture. For new business models, in order to meet key network performance indicators, connectivity must be flexible and agile. An integrated satellite-aerial-terrestrial network (I-SAT) has recently stimulated interest in providing wireless communication due to its high maneuverability, versatile deployment, and pervasive connectivity. The resource planning, task distribution, and action management of an I-SAT can be accomplished through effective acquisition, coordination, transmission, and aggregation of diverse information. This paper considers an I-SAT network, in which multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with aerial stations and a terrestrial base station (BS), in a cognitive setting, in the presence of satellite-receiver communication, are deployed to support smart vehicles on the ground. By taking into account different limitations and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints, the goal is to maximize the average throughput among users by jointly optimizing user association, BS/UAV transmission power, and UAV trajectory. The formulated problem is a non-convex optimization problem with a complicated expression that is hard to solve. To tackle this problem, an alternating iterative algorithm based on the block descent method is proposed. Precisely, the problem is subdivided into three subproblems, transmitter-vehicle association optimization, BS/UAV power allocation optimization, and UAV trajectory control. Then, in an iterative process, these subproblems are solved sequentially. The proposed solution uses a segment-by-segment technique, which breaks the complete UAV flight trajectory into smaller time segments to reduce computation time when the network service period is considerable. As a result, each time segment’s optimization can be solved more quickly. Furthermore, the paper presents the results of network simulations carried out to assess the efficiency of the proposed solution. The findings show that the presented scheme outperforms different benchmark schemes in terms of the average user throughput when observing multiple different scenarios.