Design and Analysis of Cooperative Multicast-Unicast Transmission Scheme in Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

摘要

The rapid development of the mobile Internet results in the explosive increase of content demands. In order to improve the efficiency of content delivery, the mobile edge computing (MEC) has been widely explored. Meanwhile, as the hybrid satellite-terrestrial network gradually becomes the trend of next-generation mobile communication, the terrestrial backhaul load is expected to be relieved. However, existing works do not take into account the exploitable potential of a benign combination of the user preference characteristics and evolving satellite processing capabilities, thus we proposed hybrid satellite-terrestrial double-edge networks (HSTDEN), promoting the collaboration between satellite MEC (S-MEC) and the terrestrial MEC (T-MEC). Besides, a novel cooperative multicast-unicast transmission (CMUT) scheme is proposed. Multicast can efficiently serve popular requests, while unicast is targeted at personalized requests to avoid them being never served. Finally, a system-level OPNET platform is built to analyze the performance of proposed scheme. Numerical results show that our proposed CMUT scheme has advantages in relieving terrestrial backhaul load, especially in the scenarios where content convergence is high.