Virtualized QoS-Driven Spectrum Allocation in Space-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

The space-terrestrial integrated network (STIN), one of the hottest trends in technology, is transforming our future through interconnecting heterogeneous devices. It has a revolutionary impact on reshaping the industry and changing the world. The extending of new generation network spectrum resources creates tremendous opportunities for obtaining high-level terrestrial network and brings a good prospect for the development of STIN, but STIN still faces a big change of resource shortage caused by the ever increasing heterogeneous devices. In this article, a new STIN architecture supporting virtualization technology is first designed to manage spectrum resource in STIN to satisfy various quality of service (QoS) requirements from heterogeneous devices. Then a dynamic virtualized QoS-driven spectrum allocation algorithm (VQSA) is proposed to improve the QoS from different devices in STIN. VQSA classifies heterogeneous devices into virtual cells according to their QoS correlation and determines the corresponding base stations and satellites for providing services. Spectrum resources in multiple base stations and satellites are rationally assigned in a virtual cell to serve heterogeneous devices with different QoS requirements. Finally, simulation results are provided to show the efficiency of the architecture and the VQSA algorithm in terms of transmission delay and transmission rate.