Cooperative Resource Scheduling for Environment Sensing in Satellite–Terrestrial Vehicular Networks

In this article, we investigate infrastructure-assisted environment sensing in satellite-terrestrial vehicular networks (STVN) for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), where satellites and roadside units (RSUs) cooperate to provide CAVs with fresh sensing data. To support satellite- and RSU-assisted environment sensing for CAVs, we formulate a long-term resource scheduling problem in STVN to satisfy sensing data freshness requirements with efficient resource usage. To deal with the challenges posed by the dynamic network environment as well as stringent data freshness requirements, we propose a cooperative satellite-terrestrial resource scheduling (CSTRS) scheme. CSTRS is a model-data co-driven approach that can jointly optimize the sensing interval and resource allocation in STVN. Specifically, benefiting from the multicast feature of the low Earth orbit satellite, coalition game, and particle swarm optimization-based algorithms are designed to partition CAVs into groups and optimize sensing intervals in large timescales. Then, a reinforcement learning-based algorithm is developed to make real-time computing and communication resource allocation decisions based on the CAV partition. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms benchmark methods in terms of resource usage and reliability performance.