Inter-domain Resource Collaboration in Satellite Networks: An Intelligent Scheduling Approach Towards Hybrid Missions

Abstract

Since the next-generation satellite network consisting of various service function domains, such as communication, observation, navigation, etc., is moving towards large-scale, using single-domain resources is difficult to provide satisfied and timely service guarantees for the rapidly increasing mission demands of each domain. Breaking the barriers of independence of resources in each domain, and realizing the cross-domain transmission of missions to efficiently collaborate inter-domain resources is a promising solution. However, the hybrid scheduling of different missions and the continuous increase in the number of service domains have strengthened the differences and dynamics of mission demands, making it challenging for an efficient cross-domain mission scheduling (CMS). To this end, this paper first accurately characterizes the communication resource state of inter-satellite in real-time exploiting the sparse resource representation scheme, and systematically characterizes the differentiation of mission demands by conducting the mission priority model. Based on the information of resources and missions, we construct the top- and bottom-layer mission scheduling models of reward association exploiting the correlation of intra- and inter-domain mission scheduling and formulate the Markov decision process-based hierarchical CMS problem. Further, to achieve higher adaptability and autonomy of CMS and efficiently mitigate the impact of network scale, a hierarchical intelligent CMS algorithm is developed to dynamically adjust and efficiently match the CMS policy according to different mission demands. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has significant performance gain compared with independent domains and the existing CMS algorithms, and can still guarantee high service performance under different network scales.