Backbone satellites in a space information network (SIN) can be used as air base stations or data relay satellites (DRSs) to realize cross-system, cross-network and long-distance relay transmission. In this paper, a traffic load optimization problem for multi-satellite relay systems in SIN is considered to achieve highly efficient cooperative transmission and improve resource utility. A model of SIN based on a distributed satellite cluster (DSC) is considered, and the characteristics of the model are analyzed. Based on this, a hybrid resource management architecture combining distributed and central resources control schemes is proposed to realize a centrally controllable and distributed optimization of resources to meet various comprehensive service requirements. Two scenarios of multi-satellite relay systems in SIN are given, and traffic load optimization problems with joint bandwidth and power allocation for these two scenarios are formulated based on proportional fairness (PF) criterion to achieve traffic load balancing with considerable system capacity. The optimization problems in these two scenarios are proved to be a convex optimization problem with mathematical analysis, and the closed-form solutions of two problems in their dual domain are derived by dual transformation. With the closed-form solutions, two iterative algorithms based on the subgradient method are designed under the proposed hybrid resource management architecture to solve the problems in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can effectively improve the upper bound of system capacity by resource sharing and cooperative relay, and it can balance the traffic load well with guarantees of a reasonable level system capacity compared with existing methods.
Keywords: fairness resource allocation; radio resource management; satellite communication; traffic load balancing.