Adaptive shipborne base station sleeping control for dynamic broadband maritime communications

Increasing marine activities taking place within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) have made broadband maritime communications very attractive in recent years. In this paper, a coordinated satellite and terrestrial architecture (II-CST) is presented to implement real-time and broadband Internet access at sea. Further, since the mobility of shipborne base stations (S-BSs) may cause complex inter-cell interference (ICI), an S-BS sleeping control scheme is proposed to adapt the system resource allocation corresponding with the user load. When the proportion of blocked users is beyond threshold, the sleeping control process is triggered to reduce ICI and recover broadband access. Then we use the sailing position of accessed users as a constraint to adjust the downlink power allocation of S-BSs. Simulation results with real ship data of China's Yellow Sea show that under the II-CST, our adaptive S-BS sleeping control can contribute to achievable downlink data rate, mobility robustness, and power efficiency of the dynamic broadband maritime communication system.