A Satellite Handover Scheme Considering the Link Outage Probability in Satellite-UAV Integrated Networks

This paper introduces a novel satellite handover scheme considering the link outage probability (SHLOP). It aims to improve the resource utilization of satellite handover processes in satellite- UAV integrated networks and address the limitations that the state-of-the-art failed to consider the impact of intermittent satellite-ground and inter-satellite links in UAV collaborative penetration scenarios. SHLOP dynamically adjusts the ratio of allocated channel resources for handover according to the link outage probability and the number of UAVs, which helps to reach a compromise between handover success probability and resource efficiency excluding wasted resources. Besides, a performance evaluation model is developed to analyze the relationship between resource utilization, the ratio of reserved resources, the number of users, and the link outage probability. The formulated model identifies a closed-form solution for the optimal reserved resource ratio, which optimizes the SHLOP performance. Numerical evaluation results show that SHLOP outperforms the PDRA and DCR-DQN by at least 11% in terms of resource utilization with intermittent links.