Civil aircraft assisted space-air-ground integrated networks: Architecture design and coverage analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel AI-enabled space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGIN). This new integrated networks architecture consists of LEO satellites and civil aircrafts carrying aerial base stations, called "civil aircraft assisted SAGIN (CAA-SAGIN)". The assistance of civil aircrafts can reduce the stress of satellite networks, improve the performance of SAGIN, decrease the construction cost and save space resources. Taking the Chinese mainland as an example, this paper has analyzed the distribution of civil aircrafts, and obtained the coverage characteristics of civil aircraft assisted networks (CAAN). Taking Starlink as the benchmark, this paper has calculated the service gap of CAAN, and designed the joint coverage constellation. The simulation results prove that the number of satellites in CAA-SAGIN can be greatly reduced with the assistance of civil aircrafts at the same data rate.