Resource Collaboration Between Satellite and Wide-Area Mobile Base Stations in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Network

The integrated satellite-terrestrial network with cascaded downlinks from satellites to wide-area mobile base stations and subsequently to terrestrial users enables global communication for terrestrial 4G/5G cellular users and is widely used in emergency rescue scenarios. However, in this network, satellites and wide-area mobile base stations are controlled by distinct resource scheduling systems with disparate packet queues, which means resources allocated by the satellite to the wide-area mobile base stations may not match the resources allocated by the wide-area mobile base stations to the terrestrial users, leading to coordination inefficiencies and resource wastage. To tackle this challenge, a resource collaborative scheduling mechanism based on cooperative game theory for cascaded downlinks is established, which effectively adapts to distinct resource scheduling systems with various QoS constraints. Then, the utility function of the Nash product is converted into a max-min problem, and a convex transformation method is proposed for the non-convex optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed collaborative scheduling mechanism effectively improves resource utilization and the transmission rate of cascaded downlinks.