Unified Design of Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Maritime Communications

2025-08-13

AI Summary

To address the challenge of achieving wide-area seamless communication and QoS assurance amid surging maritime activities, this paper proposes an integrated air–space–ground–sea maritime communication architecture. The architecture partitions the ocean into near-, mid-, and far-sea zones and deploys satellites, UAVs, terrestrial base stations, and unmanned surface vessels in a coordinated, zone-specific manner. Methodologically, it jointly optimizes multi-dimensional resources: (i) a zonal collaborative service mechanism is designed, and (ii) UAV trajectories and multi-node beamforming are co-optimized to maximize the minimum achievable rate among edge users. Theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the system’s minimum rate—by 32.7% over benchmark schemes—while enhancing coverage robustness and QoS guarantee capability. This work establishes a scalable, cooperative networking paradigm tailored for highly dynamic maritime environments.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization

Abstract

With the explosive growth of maritime activities, it is expected to provide seamless communications with quality of service (QoS) guarantee over broad sea area. In the context, this paper proposes a space-air-ground-sea integrated maritime communication architecture combining satellite, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), terrestrial base station (TBS) and unmanned surface vessel (USV). Firstly, according to the distance away from the shore, the whole marine space is divided to coastal area, offshore area, middle-sea area and open-sea area, the maritime users in which are served by TBS, USV, UAV and satellite, respectively. Then, by exploiting the potential of integrated maritime communication system, a joint beamforming and trajectory optimization algorithm is designed to maximize the minimum transmission rate of maritime users. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Problem

• Design integrated maritime communication for seamless QoS coverage
• Optimize beamforming and trajectory to maximize user transmission rates
• Validate system effectiveness through theoretical analysis and simulations

Innovation

• Integrated satellite-UAV-TBS-USV maritime communication architecture
• Joint beamforming and trajectory optimization algorithm
• Division of marine space into four service areas