Safety-Oriented Resource Allocation for Space-Ground Integrated Cloud Networks of High-Speed Railways

Abstract

Enabling completely universal coverage, the space-ground communication system integration is one of the most important aspects in the fifth generation (5G) or even the next 6G wireless communications, which significantly benefits railways whose transportation lines always cross diverse environments. Based on this observation, to achieve seamless coverage for environment-diverse high-speed railways (HSRs), by leveraging the control/user-plane (C/U-plane) decoupling and cloud radio access network (C-RAN) technologies, we propose a space-ground integrated cloud railway network consisting of space and ground cloud layers, where in the space, baseband units (BBUs) of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites are collected and centrally-managed by geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites. To improve the mobility support and take advantage of the stable and ultra-wide terrestrial coverage of GEO satellites, we establish an additional backup space C-plane (BS-C-plane) connection between trains and GEO satellites. Under this architecture with diverse network resources, we develop a safety-oriented resource allocation scheme based on both the resource allocation priority of safety services and the network handover costs to deliver the safety-oriented services. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can always meet the transmission requirements for safety services in HSRs.