Semicentralized Online Resource Allocation for Ensuring QoS in Deep Space DTN

ABSTRACT Deep space exploration has seen rapid advancements in recent years, accompanied by a surge in exploration equipment and service traffic. Delay/disruption‐tolerant networks (DTNs) offer a robust communication architecture to support these missions by providing unified and efficient communication services. A critical network metric, the service payoff, reflects the value delivered by the network and is directly tied to the ability to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements for diverse service flows. However, in the deep‐space DTN architecture, there is a lack of solutions for allocating corresponding network resources for different service flows to achieve QoS guarantees, making it challenging to improve network service payoff. Therefore, this paper introduces a fully centralized online resource allocation (FCORA) scheme to maximize the service payoff in deep space DTNs. By incorporating non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology, the scheme enhances spectrum utilization through joint optimization of bandwidth allocation, user clustering, and power control. To address the computational challenges of centralized allocation, we propose a semicentralized online resource allocation (SCORA) algorithm, which offloads fine‐grained service flow control to edge nodes using parallel edge computing. Simulation results demonstrate that FCORA and SCORA significantly enhance service payoff, even under heavy traffic conditions. Furthermore, SCORA achieves low computational latency, meeting the real‐time requirements for online resource allocation in deep space DTNs.