Bandit approach for unmanned aerial vehicle-centric low earth orbit satellite selection

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of optimal low earth orbit satellite (LEO-Sat) selection by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in space air ground integrated networks (SAGINs) will be investigated. The primary objective is to maximize the UAV's achievable data rate while ensuring a prolonged remaining visible time for the selected LEO-Sat. This problem poses significant challenges due to the highly dynamic nature caused by the substantial relative velocity between UAV and LEO-Sats, making LEO-Sats' features, e.g., elevation angle, remaining visible time, and the available bandwidth strongly time-dependent. Moreover, some LEO-Sats will appear/disappear from UAV visibility within short time intervals. An online learning approach will be proposed to efficiently address this highly dynamic problem, where it will be modeled as contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) with dynamic arms. Through this modeling, the time varying LEO-Sats' features as well as their dynamic appearance/disappearance will be taken into account while selecting the best LEO-Sat. Through extensive numerical analysis, the performance of the proposed approach nearly matches that of the highly complex optimal performance based on exhaustive searching with negligible time complexity, and it outperforms conventional schemes that individually maximize one of the LEO-Sats' features.