On Use of LEO-GEO Hybrid Model for Optimized Data Traffic Performance

• Published in: Wireless personal communications Vol. 138; no. 1; pp. 641 - 657
• Main Authors: Ali, Hany, Abouelatta, Mohamed, Youssef, Khaled Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 2024; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; Agricultural aircraft; Communication satellites; Communications Engineering; Communications systems; Computer Communication Networks; Control data (computers); Downlinking; Earth surface; Engineering; High speed; Internet of Things; Low earth orbit satellites; Networks; Oceans; Remote control; Remote sensing; Satellite communications; Satellite constellations; Satellite tracking; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Traffic delay; Multicast; Hybrid LEO-GEO; Downlink utilization efficiency; Unicast; Downlink high-speed data rate demand; Satellite communication
• ISSN: 0929-6212; 1572-834X
• DOI: 10.1007/s11277-024-11527-z

As the world is moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), more data rate is required with wider coverage and small delay. While the 5G supports the needed increased data rate, it suffers from a decreased coverage per tower. In contrast, the low population areas such as deserts, oceans, forests, and mountains contain most of the world's transportation such as highways, ships, and planes as well as large areas of agricultural lands that are all not supported by 5G. Consequently, LEO satellite constellations have been introduced to cover the earth's surface with a high-speed data rate. Each LEO satellite constellation requires 4000 + satellites and at least one ground base station (BS) for control, tracking, telemetry, and remote sensing functions. However, to support the needed downlink high-speed data rate demand, the LEO satellite constellation must add many BSs to increase the uplink data rate. As a result, the GEO communication satellites face great competitors in their market. This paper introduces the hybrid LEO-GEO satellite communication system to change this competition into cooperation that benefits both systems. In the hybrid LEO-GEO satellite communication system, this paper proposes maximizing the downlink utilization of both LEO and GEO satellites by the traffic-aware Artificial Expectation Detection (AED) technique. In such a technique, the trending multicast data choose the GEO link while the unicast data and control data choose the LEO link to maximize the downlink utilization efficiency. Our results show that using AED is power efficient and delay efficient while increasing the data rate by (100)x to (100k)x or decreasing the needed number of LEO BSs.