Joint Beamforming and Trajectory Design for Space-Ground-Sea Integrated Maritime Communications

The rapid growth of maritime activities has promoted the need for reliable maritime communication technologies. Fortunately, the unmanned surface vessel (USV) with agile deployment and adaptive capability has shown its potential in maritime communications. To this context, this paper proposes a space-ground-sea integrated maritime communication system combining satellite, USV and terrestrial base station (TBS). According to the offshore distance, the system divides the marine space into coastal area, offshore area and open-sea area, the maritime users in which are served by TBS, USV and satellite, respectively. Then, a joint beamforming and trajectory optimization algorithm is developed with the objective of maximizing the minimum transmission rate of all users. Finally, both theoretical analysis and simulation results confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.