Optimal Satellite Scheduling with Critical Node Analysis

Earth satellite networks are playing an increasingly important role in observation, surveillance and reconnaissance of specific targets or areas with dramatic growing of the demand for such services. The harsh and vulnerable space environment makes satellite nodes susceptible to a variety of attacks and prompts us to protect satellite networks by securing them with efficient defending strategy. In this paper, we propose a satellite scheduling problem in a vulnerable space environment. A set of complex operational constraints is imposed to make the best defending strategy between task requests and satellites under protection. To reduce the complexity, we decompose the original problem into two subproblems of satellite scheduling and satellite protection. A joint optimization algorithm is adopted to find near optimal solution. The results of extensive computational experiments show its effective and superior scheduling performance.