Fairness-based user association and resource blocks allocation in satellite–terrestrial integrated networks

Abstract

To meet the futuristic communications needs, a satellite–terrestrial integrated network (STIN) has been proposed and is a strong contender amongst emerging architectures. In our STIN model, we have considered a satellite-based base station (BS), dovetailed with a terrestrial N-tier heterogeneous network (HetNets). Our work considers jointly admission control of user equipment (UE), power allocation , fairness-based user association (UA), and fair spectrum resource allocation to UEs in STIN. With throughput maximization as an objective, considering such an environment, has not been investigated in the past. The formulated problem is a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem that is Non-deterministic Polynomial-time Hard (NP-hard) and to achieve an optimal solution, it requires an exhaustive search. But, the computational load of exhaustive search increases exponentially as the number of UEs increases. Therefore, to obtain a near-optimal solution having low computational load an outer approximation algorithm (OAA) is proposed. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, extensive simulation work has been performed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by the results in terms of fairness in UA, fairness in resource block (RB) allocation, and throughput in the downlink (DL).