Cooperative Resource Allocation in Integrated Terrestrial/Non-Terrestrial 5G and beyond Networks

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) based on the emerging 5G New Radio (NR) technology stand as an effective solution to complement terrestrial networks in service provisioning, owing to their ability to satisfy requests of anywhere and anytime connection, and to increase network scalability by delivering multicast/broadcast services to groups of NTN terminals through Point-to-Multipoint transmissions. However, current satellite systems operating at different orbits remain isolated islands and fail to express their true potential if not properly made interoperable with ground networks. In the light of effectively integrating existing 5G networks into a unified system, we propose a cooperative radio resource management scheme that enhances the performance of an integrated terrestrial-NTN system based on the emerging 5G NR technology. It leverages the principles of multicast subgrouping techniques to determine which users will get connected to either terrestrial base station (i.e., gNB) or NTN cell (i.e., NTN-gNB) and properly allocate resources in order to improve the overall network throughput. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.