Distributed Coordination of Space–Ground Multiresources for Remote Sensing Missions

Abstract

As data relay satellites (DRSs) play an increasingly important supporting role in remote sensing missions, efficient coordination across space–ground multiresources becomes a significant problem. Owing to the implementation problem of the centralized coordinate methods, this paper studies a distributed coordinate resource scheduling method which is realizable in the current space network structure. To be specific, we first formulate the multiple resource coordination problem into an MILP problem based on a modified time-expanded graph. Then, the problem is transferred and decomposed into subproblems for remote sensing satellite (RSS) systems and DRS systems to solve distributedly. Afterwards, we propose a distributed iterative scheme for the RSS systems and DRS systems based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), in which only the schedule information of the inter-satellite links are required to exchange between RSS systems and DRS systems. Simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our distributed coordinated resource scheduling algorithm.