학술논문

Toward the Age in Cislunar Communication: An AoI-Optimal Multi-Relay Constellation With Heterogeneous Orbits
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Journal on. 42(5):1420-1435 May, 2024
Subject
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Relays
Moon
Planetary orbits
Optimal scheduling
Job shop scheduling
Earth
Satellite constellations
Cislunar communication
relay satellite constellation
scheduling strategy
Age of Information
Language
ISSN
0733-8716
1558-0008
Abstract
With the proliferation of massive explorations on Lunar Far-side Surface (LFS), deployments of scientific infrastructures have drawn substantial attention with the aids of relay satellites for the moon, i.e., China’s “Queqiao”, which allows real-time reporting for current status information from the landing equipment and space vehicles. Without suitable constellation with well-designed scheduling scheme, it would be very difficult to get timely information if depending only on single Halo relay satellite due to large coverage gap and limited energy budget for the communication links. In this paper, we design a hybrid circular-Halo orbital multi-relay constellation system for the LFS communication by minimizing the average per-device Age of Information (AoI) of users on the earth. In particular, we develop an age-optimal scheduling strategy with constellation design for accessing different relay satellite of constellation by solving a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) optimization problem to significantly reduce the average coverage gap in LFS area. Simulation results show that the average per-device AoI of the proposed scheduling algorithm with the well-designed constellation could achieve 16.20% less in time than that of single Halo satellite relay system compared with typical algorithms.