Packet Routing and Energy Cooperation for RTU Satellite-Terrestrial Multi-Hop Network in Remote Cyber-Physical Power System

The cutting-edge applications of cyber-physical power systems (CPPS) must transmit large volumes of data packets collected by massive remote terminal units (RTUs) to the control center. To develop high-reliability and self-sustainable communication networks for the RTUs deployed in hard-to-reach areas, we propose an RTU satellite-terrestrial multi-hop network with energy cooperation for remote CPPS. Specifically, data packets generated by RTUs are either transmitted to faraway base station (BS) in a multi-hop manner or uploaded to satellite network, and each RTU harvests ambient renewable power with the capacity to transfer harvested energy to the relay RTU. We then develop a multi-agent learning-based packet routing and energy cooperation approach (MAQMIX-PREC) to maximize the network throughput by jointly optimizing relay selection, sub-slot partition, and channel allocation. This approach effectively decouples the decision-making and coordinates the training among RTUs in the RTU multi-hop network. Experimental evaluations illustrate that the proposed approach achieves congestion-awareness and energy cooperation, and outperforms benchmark methods in terms of training convergence, network throughput, and traffic intensity.