Optimal Topology Design of High Altitude Platform Based Maritime Broadband Communication Networks

To satisfy the increasing demand for various types of coastal wireless communication, the pursuit of fully functional and low cost means of maritime broadband communication is imminent. High Altitude Platform (HAP) based maritime communication is a promising solution to improve the quality of coverage on the sea. In this paper, we present Integrated HAP-Sea-Land Network (IHSL) architecture for maritime broadband communication. And then we focus on the problem of Optimal Topology Design (OTD) which is an important issue for the IHSL network deployment in practice. We formulate the OTD problem as a generic integer linear programming (ILP) model with the objective of minimizing the total deployment cost subject to coverage, reliability, and topology constraints of the network. The linear programming solver Gurobi is applied to solve the ILP model. A series of case studies are conducted to validate the optimization framework and demonstrated the solvability and scalability of the ILP model. The simulation results show the significant performance benefits of IHSL in terms of cost and reliability under 1-coverage and 2-coverage. The proposed optimization framework is expected to provide a guideline for the IHSL network deployment in practice.