Joint Beamformer Design and User Scheduling in Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Networks

In this paper, we investigate the downlink transmission in the integrated terrestrial satellite networks, whereby the same spectrum is shared between two systems, and thus interference to each other should be carefully mitigated. We address this challenging issue by unifying the terrestrial beamformer design and satellite user scheduling into the same optimization framework. This nontrivial problem is decomposed into two subproblems, one deals with the terrestrial beamformer design to control the interference from the terrestrial base stations to the satellite users, the other tries to optimize the scheduling of the satellite users following the framing structure the DVB-S2X standards for satellite communication systems. A deep clustering user scheduling scheme is developed to group suitable satellite users to the same frame using the channel state information as the input feature. Finally, a joint iterative algorithm is designed to maximize the sum rate of all users in the integrated systems. We conduct extensive simulation results to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.