Distributed User Association With Grouping in Satellite–Terrestrial Integrated Networks

The satellite–terrestrial integrated network (STIN) has been envisioned as an emerging architecture to provide global anytime anywhere network access, and satisfy transmission requirements of high-capacity backhaul data. However, the integration of satellite and terrestrial networks will aggravate the diversity of base stations (BSs) in backhaul delay and capacity, as well as coverage area, which makes it difficult for users with diverse requirements to access the most suitable service BS. As an effort to address the above problems, a distributed user association with grouping (DUAG) mechanism is proposed via the interaction between BSs and users to maximize the sum rate and balance the load of STIN while meeting the user’s demand by user grouping. First, the transmission characteristics of terrestrial and backhaul links are analyzed after constructing a STIN model, which consists of satellite, three types of BSs, and the variety of intelligent terminals. Then, the user association problems are formulated to maximize the sum rate and balance the load of STIN via jointly considering the backhaul capacity of BSs and mobility and delay of users. Meanwhile, the DUAG mechanism is proposed to associate users with the most suitable service BSs. In DUAG, a greedy-based user association algorithm with user grouping is developed for maximizing the sum rate via giving priority to users with high data rate, and a matching algorithm with user grouping is designed for balancing the load by means of performing multiple iterations between users and BSs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DUAG can maximize the sum rate and balance the load of STIN while guaranteeing the delay demand of user with the increase of user density.