Flexible Resource Allocation for eMBB and mMTC services in a Time-Varying Satellite Topology

The incorporated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) in 6G networks are essential to provide global connectivity and support heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements. Network slicing (NS) is the key technological enabler to realize these requirements by provisioning various services over the same physical infrastructure. While showing outstanding performance in terrestrial networks, having efficient NS deployment in NTNs is challenging due to the highly dynamic nature of NTN topology. In this paper, we investigate network slicing in dynamic environment of the integrated low earth orbit (LEO)-terrestrial network serving distinct services, namely enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). In particular, we propose a flexible resource allocation routing framework and introduce a multiscale time slot concept to efficiently embed mMTC and eMBB services considering the very fast variation of LEO topology. A mathematical model based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) is proposed with the objective to maximize the number of served requests subjected to services' deadlines and topology dynamics. To tackle the high complexity of the formulated optimization problem, an iterative algorithm based on successive convex approximation (SCA) is proposed. The simulation results reveal that the proposed solution outperforms the benchmark schemes in terms of percentage of served requests and average eMBB sum rate.