UAV Access Control for Urban Emergency Communications in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN) inherently provide the mobility and flexibility for post-disaster reconstruction networks, especially for densely populated urban areas with surging emergency communication traffic in a short time. In this context, our work considers access selection by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for ground users with distinct priorities, constrained by the transmission capacity of the air-space segment. We mathematically formulate a 0–1 integer access optimization problem to maximize the uplink capacity of SAGIN and provide a pair of solutions to the non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problem: accessing state transfer based dynamic programming (ASTDP) and branch-and-bound based heuristic (BBH) design. Specifically, the ASTDP aims to find the optimal access solution while the BBH focuses on the high efficiency by reducing the searching complexity. Finally, extensive simulation results verify the efficiency of the proposed BBH design in terms of the available transmission capacity for urban emergency communications in uplink SAGIN.