Unified Design of Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Maritime Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes an integrated maritime communication system combining satellite, UAV, terrestrial base stations, and USVs, with optimized beamforming and trajectory planning to enhance QoS across diverse sea areas.

Contribution

It introduces a novel unified architecture and a joint optimization algorithm tailored for seamless, high-quality maritime communications over broad sea regions.

Findings

The proposed algorithm improves minimum transmission rates.

The system effectively covers different maritime zones.

Simulation validates the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

With the explosive growth of maritime activities, it is expected to provide seamless communications with quality of service (QoS) guarantee over broad sea area. In the context, this paper proposes a space-air-ground-sea integrated maritime communication architecture combining satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), terrestrial base station (TBS) and unmanned surface vessel (USV). Firstly, according to the distance away from the shore, the whole marine space is divided to coastal area, offshore area, middle-sea area and open-sea area, the maritime users in which are served by TBS, USV, UAV and satellite, respectively. Then, by exploiting the potential of integrated maritime communication system, a joint beamforming and trajectory optimization algorithm is designed to maximize the minimum transmission rate of maritime users. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.