Gateway Placement in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks: Supporting Communications and Internet of Remote Things

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have become a promising architecture to integrate with terrestrial networks for facilitating communications and Internet of Remote Things (IoRT) services through gateways. Nevertheless, different gateway locations may have various channel conditions and service demands due to differentiated atmospheric conditions, populations, and number of terminal devices required by IoRT services in different areas. Besides, the gateway placement scheme further affects the service coverage performance and the access performance of the network to service demands. Therefore, gateway placement plays a pivotal role in improving network capabilities in the integrated system of LEO satellites and terrestrial networks (ISoLS-TNs). Motivated by the aforementioned facts, in this article, we first formulate the gateway placement problem in ISoLS-TNs as a multiobjective optimization problem to maximize the total revenue of service data demand within coverage while minimizing the average access distance and the number of deployed gateways. In order to enhance network resource utilization and assure local information confidentiality, a distributed resource allocation (DRA) mechanism based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMMs) algorithm is designed to calculate the total revenue of service data demand within coverage. Furthermore, we propose a genetic-based gateway placement algorithm with the ADMM for DRA. Finally, through massive simulations based on real data, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in improving resource utilization and coverage performance of the network. In addition, the results also bring lights on the relationship between service data demand distribution and gateway location preference.