Airborne Internet: An Ultradense LEO Networks Empowered Satellite-to-Aircraft Access and Resource Management Approach

Abstract

With the rapid development of low earth orbit (LEO) satellite technologies and constellation projects (like Starlink, OneWeb), the ongoing ultra-dense LEO satellite networks can provide an efficient solution to ubiquitous connection of aircraft. It is urgent to design the ultra-dense LEO network enabled satellite-to-aircraft communication for in-cabin users with high-speed Internet connectivity requirements. In this paper, we investigate the resource scheduling of ultra-dense LEO network enabled satellite-to-aircraft communication and the in-cabin communication inside aircraft in civil aviation. First, we adopt the Lyapunov optimization framework to tackle the high dynamic and fast mobility of satellites and aircraft. For the satellite-to-aircraft access and subchannel assignment, we propose a dynamic access and subchannel allocation algorithm based on matching theory, which can converge to a stable matching within a finite iterations. To guarantee customized needs of in-cabin users, we propose a power control algorithm based on the successive convex approximation technology to optimize the power allocation of satellites on each subchannel and the transmit power of aircraft for each in-cabin user, which is proven to obtain a saddle point or a local minimum with low complexity. Extensive simulations have been carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed resource allocation method.