Process-Oriented Optimization for Beyond 5G Cognitive Satellite-UAV Networks (Invited Paper)

The coverage area of terrestrial 4G/5G networks is usually limited, far from satisfying the communication demand in the remote rural, the post disaster and maritime scenarios. Both satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be adopted to solve this problem in the 6G era. Towards this end, we consider a cognitive satellite-UAV network (CSUN), where satellite and UAVs are managed in a coordinated manner, and opportunistically share spectrum to alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem. Particularly, we use the UAV swarm to mitigate the satellite-UAV interference. Motivated by practical applications, the limited on-board energy and imperfectly acquired channel state information (CSI) are discussed. We propose a process-oriented optimization scheme to maximize the data transmission efficiency, which jointly optimizes the transmit power and hovering time of UAV swarm for the whole flight process. The scheme takes both energy constraints and interference power constraints into account, and performs in an iterative way. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, which could be an effective solution for extending the coverage performance of terrestrial 4G/5G networks.