Multi-Beam Satellite Optical Networks: A Joint Time-Slot Resource Scheduling for End-to-End Services From a Networking Perspective

Journal article, 2025

Satellite optical networks combined with multi-beam technologies can be referred to as multi-beam satellite optical networks (MB-SONs). These networks are expected to play a crucial role in satellite Internet, potentially achieving Gigabit/s inter-satellite (IS) communication in the future. However, the growing demand for the satellite-to-mobile communications bring a challenge for making use of hybrid IS and satellite-to-ground (SG) transmission resources, which is worthy of studying. Given the different characteristics of IS links and SG links in terms of time windows and transmission capacities, existing solutions can hardly provide a suitable option for the optimal utilization of transmission capacity in MB-SONs. In this paper, we focus on the joint scheduling of optical wavelengths in IS and multiple beams in SG for the services sent from one ground station to the other ground station (which are referred to as end-to-end services). In response to the above-mentioned different characteristics of IS and SG links, we find that at least two constraints need to be followed in the joint scheduling. Also, the length of common time window will not exceed the minimum time window of IS and SG links on the path. The second one is that the volume of transmission capacity of a path depends on the length of CTW and the minimum bandwidth of IS and SG links, which should meet the service requirements. Considering these two constraints related to the length of CTW and the volume of transmission capacity, the main contributions of this paper can be concluded: i) defining the joint time slot allocation (JTSA) problem for multiple beams and wavelengths with different transmission capacities, ii) proposing an integer linear programming (ILP) model with object to minimize the number of time slots occupied by services, iii) designing the common time window for time slot assignment (CTW-TSA) algorithm as an option in practical implementations. The proposed ILP and CTW-TSA algorithm are evaluated by comparing the simulation results with the scheme using. The simulation of the CTW-TSA algorithm was compared to separate resource scheduling (SRS) without the store-and-forward function. The results showed a reduction of almost 0.201 in service blocking probability and an increase in average bandwidth utilization of about 0.159 for IS links and 0.164 for SG uplinks/downlinks.