Power and Flow Assignment for 5G Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Backhaul Networks

The optimal flow assignment is strongly dependent on the network link capacities, which in turn are determined by the allocation of the available radio resources. In this paper, we consider the holistic design of joint power and flow assignment in the context of Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Backhaul (ITSB) networks. Aiming for an spectral efficient system, we focus on the scenario where the satellite links operate in the non-exclusive Ka band, which is shared with the terrestrial microwave backhaul links. We focus on the maximization of the network throughput considering a penalizing term to restrict the use of the satellite links in order to avoid the expensive cost of satellite bandwidth. The interference resulting from the spectrum sharing assumption makes the joint power and flow assignment a very challenging problem. We propose a convex relaxation approach which eases the formulation and allows the implementation of efficiency convex optimization tools to achieve a feasible solution to the original problem. Supporting results based on numerical simulations validate the proposed approach.