Joint Satellite Gateway Placement and Routing in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

Abstract: With the increasing attention to the integrated satellite-terrestrial networks (ISTNs), the satellite gateway placement problem becomes of paramount importance. The resulting network performance may vary depending on the different design strategies. In this paper, a joint satellite gateway placement and routing strategy for the terrestrial network is proposed to minimize the overall cost of gateway deployment and traffic routing, while adhering to the average delay requirement for traffic demands. Although traffic routing and gateway placement can be solved independently, the dependence between the routing decisions for different demands makes it more realistic to solve an aggregated model instead. We develop a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) formulation for the problem. We relax the integrality constraints to achieve a linear program (LP) which reduces time-complexity at the expense of a sub-optimal solution. We further propose a variant of the proposed model to balance the load between the selected gateways.