STARS-GS is proposed, a truthful and feasibility-aware scheduling mechanism that combines bid-aware admission control, best-fit ground-station assignment, Earliest Deadline First (EDF)-based bandwidth scheduling, and critical-payment pricing, and scales smoothly to workloads containing up to 900 tasks.
Abstract
The rapid growth of Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations has created increasing demand for efficient and scalable downlink services. Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) provides an on-demand access model for satellite operators, but commercial GSaaS providers must schedule limited ground-station bandwidth among multiple satellites with heterogeneous data demands, overlapping visibility windows, strict deadlines, and strategic bidding behaviors. This paper studies GSaaS resource scheduling from a ground-station-centric perspective, where the provider jointly determines task admission, ground-station assignment, bandwidth allocation, and payments. Under satellite orbital dynamics, bandwidth constraints, and downlink task deadlines, maximizing the provider's revenue is NP-hard. To address this challenge, we propose STAR-GS, a truthful and feasibility-aware scheduling mechanism that combines bid-aware admission control, best-fit ground-station assignment, Earliest Deadline First (EDF)-based bandwidth scheduling, and critical-payment pricing. By integrating auction theory with schedulability analysis, STAR-GS incentivizes task owners to truthfully report their private valuations while ensuring that admitted tasks can be feasibly completed before their deadlines. Simulations using Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK) show that STAR-GS consistently achieves higher revenue than heuristic baselines, obtains near-MILP performance with substantially lower runtime, and scales smoothly to workloads containing up to 900 tasks.
Large low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Earth-observation (EO) constellations offer frequent access to geographically dispersed ground targets, but emergency requests may arrive after committed routine-plan execution has begun. The resulting dynamic emergency observation scheduling problem (DEOSP) requires urgent tasks to be inserted under intermittent ground contact without excessive routine-plan disruption. To address DEOSP, we propose a task-driven three-layer distributed scheduling (T3L-DS) method, which represents task demand and sensor footprints on a common geographic grid and forms temporary clusters from observation capabilities and current inter-satellite links. For intra-cluster coordination, T3L-DS introduces onboard dual-plan bidding and joint marginal evaluation. It also designs an inter-cluster coordination mechanism for unresolved demand. Extensive computational experiments compare T3L-DS with centralised simulated annealing (SA), an adapted selective time-variant better reply process (A-SeTVBRP), and a conventional contract-net protocol (CNP). T3L-DS achieves the highest emergency coverage among the distributed methods, with average relative improvements of approximately 2.8% and 17.1% over A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. Its average relative gap from SA is approximately 7.1%. Under conflict-enhanced loads, it reduces routine-coverage loss by approximately 57.9% and 87.7% relative to A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. The ablation study confirms the contribution of the proposed coordination enhancements. Overall, the results show that T3L-DS provides an effective distributed approach to DEOSP.
Real-time telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C) access scheduling is essential for ensuring stable operation and mission execution in satellite mega-constellations. However, due to visibility-constrained satellite–ground access time windows and the limited spatial availability of access antennas and multi-band frequencies, TT&C resources—access entities such as ground stations and relay satellites—exhibit strong spatio-temporal resource utilization interdependencies (e.g., antenna access contention across frequency bands and visibility conflicts) among mission access requests, thereby exacerbating the challenges of real-time TT&C mission responsiveness in satellite mega-constellations. To address the challenges, we propose a Networked-Enhanced TT&C (NETC) scheduling framework that leverages inter-satellite links (ISLs) to provide auxiliary access bands during non-visibility periods, thereby enhancing real-time responsiveness of TT&C Mission Access (TCMA) without additional infrastructure cost. Based on the NETC, we model the TCMA problem and then construct a Spatio-temporal Resource Availability Graph (SRAG) to efficiently decouple its high-dimensional solution space. Based on this, we further propose an Attention-Mechanism-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning (AMDRL) algorithm that focuses on real-time, high-priority utilization of TT&C spatio-temporal access resources and enables dynamic awareness of evolving spatio-temporal resource utilization states, thereby supporting real-time mission scheduling decisions even in highly dynamic mega-constellation environments. Extensive simulations show that our method significantly realizes faster convergence, better spatio-temporal resource utilization, and stronger real-time mission responsiveness performance—achieving 1.8 times higher mission completion efficiency and maintaining second-level mission responsiveness even under concurrent TT&C for mega-constellations.
Chenlu Ma, Di Zhou, Min Sheng et al.· IEEE Transactions on Cogniti...· 0 citations
The rapid advancements of next-generation vehicular networks require intelligent, low-latency, and efficient resource management to support heterogeneous services. In this work, we propose a Traffic-aware Dynamic Resource Allocation (TADRA) architecture for UAV-assisted vehicular O-RAN to address the challenges of dynamic traffic conditions, infrastructure failures, and stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. Due to the dynamic mobility and flexible deployment characteristics, UAV Open Radio Units (O-RUs) in the TADRA architecture support the terrestrial infrastructure under overload or failure conditions, dynamically extending coverage, balancing traffic loads, and restoring service to maintain uninterrupted QoS across diverse and heterogeneous traffic demands. Unlike existing static or single-layer solutions, our proposed TADRA integrates RAN Intelligent Controllers (RICs) with a Hierarchical Traffic-Aware Multi-Agent Twin-Delayed (TMT) algorithm to optimize the allocation of computation and radio resources. This joint optimization problem is NP-hard, highly dynamic, and coupled across agents, making TMT a tractable and adaptive alternative. This hierarchical framework performs traffic prioritization at the upper (application) layer and resource allocation at the lower (MAC) layer, facilitating adaptive decision-making under diverse vehicular traffic patterns. Numerical results demonstrate that our solution provides substantial gains over MATD3, MADDPG, and GA, achieving 17% lower latency, 10% higher throughput, 14% lower energy consumption, and 6.5% higher reliability.
Hayla Nahom Abishu, Ahmed Badawy, Amr Mohamed et al.· IEEE Transactions on Network...· 0 citations
The results support the usefulness of hierarchical scheduling under the considered scenario-based settings, while field SCADA/PMU or hardware-in-the-loop validation remains necessary before practical deployment.
Bin Guo, Xing-Xing Feng, Haitong Gu et al.· Energies· 0 citations
In temporary emergency communication coverage scenarios where terrestrial communication infrastructure is damaged or lacks sufficient capacity, UAVs equipped with base stations have emerged as an effective solution due to their flexible deployment and rapid response capability. However, in multi-UAV networks, the three-dimensional deployment of UAVs significantly affects air-to-ground link quality, while power allocation further determines the level of system interference and throughput performance. To address this issue, this paper considers a multi-UAV communication system and jointly takes into account user link reliability and service requirement satisfaction, thereby establishing a joint optimization model for QoS-constrained coverage and network throughput. To address the non-convex joint optimization problem, a problem-tailored dual-population cooperative NSGA-II framework, termed IDPC-NSGA-II, is developed. By coupling dual-population evolution, adaptive mutation, uncovered-user-guided local search, and interference-aware repair with the characteristics of multi-UAV emergency communications, the proposed method improves the trade-off between QoS-constrained coverage and network throughput. Simulation results in a representative emergency communication scenario show that the proposed method achieves a favorable trade-off between QoS-constrained coverage and throughput, and outperforms the compared algorithms under the considered network setting.
Gui-Fen Chen, Ruiyang Liu· Digital Signal and Computer...· 0 citations
6G vehicular services, including cooperative perception, augmented reality navigation, and high-definition map updating, need computation support close to moving vehicles. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) is a natural solution, but the offloading decision becomes difficult when wireless channel conditions, vehicle density, and edge server loads vary simultaneously. In this paper, we study joint task offloading and resource allocation in 6G VEC with high- and low-frequency cooperation (HL-FC). We formulate the problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). Each vehicle decides its offloading ratio, transmission power, server association, and edge CPU request from local observations. To evaluate the proposed policy, we build a lightweight equation-driven Python simulator and compare MAPPO with Local-only, Edge-only, Random, and Greedy policies. Compared with Edge-only, MAPPO reduces the average system cost by 32.15%, 23.51%, and 17.13% under 10, 15, and 20 vehicles, respectively. It also improves the task completion rate by 21.00, 20.49, and 17.65 percentage points. Additional blockage experiments show that HL-FC keeps the policy more robust than high-frequency-only transmission under severe high-frequency blockage. The results reveal that MAPPO delivers better performance when edge resources become congested than in lightly loaded scenarios.
Zi-Heng Gu· 2026 8th International Confe...· 0 citations
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