Joint Observation, Transmission, and Computation Scheduling for Earth Observation Tasks

Various earth observation applications are in their prosperity to accumulate information for emergency surveillance and disaster relief, resulting in a surge in the number of observation tasks and the amount of observation data. Many strategies are proposed to support low-latency data transmission from observation satellites to the ground and effective computation offloading among satellites for orbital data processing. However, most existing works ignore observation resources, leading to a mismatch in observation, transmission, and computing resources, which greatly affects the efficiency of task processing. Moreover, the task heterogeneity is not adequately considered to meet diverse processing requirements. To address this gap, we propose a joint scheduling scheme to optimize the observation, transmission, and computing resources for Earth observation tasks in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks with the objective of maximizing the completed task quantity where heterogeneous tasks are involved. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can accomplish more observation tasks.