Satellite Multicast Transmission Scheme in Integrated Satellite-Maritime Networks

This paper proposes a maritime transmission scheme in integrated satellite-maritime networks, where the satellite multicast and relay cooperation cooperatively provide the ubiquitous broadband coverage for the whole sea area. Under the proposed network, the maritime users that request the same content or belong to the same fleet can be divided into one user group. Besides, the satellite provides multicast services for the all user groups, while the relay nodes retransmit the signal to other users to reduce the satellite communication cost of user group. However, since the network performance is strongly correlated with satellite links and relay nodes, it is difficult to find out the optimal cooperation solution with low complexity. Meanwhile, the user groups work in the same carrier frequency, which inevitably causes the co-channel interferences among groups. Considering these factors, we propose a cooperative access and power allocation algorithms, respectively. The cooperative access algorithm is based on channel quality and considers the channel quality of satellite and relay node simultaneously. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effective improve system performance compared with existing scheme.