VLEO Satellite Constellation Design for Regional Coverage of Aviation and Marine Users

Recently, the Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Network (SAGSIN) attracts great attention due to its ability to provide high-speed communication services to aviation users (AUs) and marine users (MUs), with Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites play an essential role. However, the available space in LEO is nearly saturated and full of massive space junks, which, combined with the ultra-low latency requirements for future 6G, presents a significant challenge. To address this issue, we propose designing a Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO)-based satellite network that efficiently serves AUs and MUs. We first create and analyze the heat maps based on actual collected data of Chinese aviation and marine communication traffic, and generate a benchmark observation point model with grid point method. Then we propose an implicit multi-objective continuous multi-variate optimization problem to achieve the maximum average coverage with minimum VLEO satellites. To solve this problem, we build a satellite constellation simulation system, using the idea of decomposition and polymerization combined with the elite strategic genetic algorithm (ESGA) of swarm intelligence optimization algorithm. Many simulation results are obtained, including the indication that the optimal VLEO constellation has the deployment features of large altitude and low inclination, and has better coverage performance for longitudinal distributed business.