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

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.