Hierarchical Cognitive Spectrum Sharing in Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

In space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs), cognitive spectrum sharing has been regarded as a promising solution to improve spectrum efficiency by enabling a secondary network to access the spectrum of a primary network. However, different networks in SAGIN may have different quality of service (QoS) requirements, which can not be well satisfied with the traditional cognitive spectrum sharing architecture. For example, the aerial network typically has high QoS requirements, which however may not be met when it acts as a secondary network. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical cognitive spectrum sharing architecture (HCSSA) for SAGINs, where the secondary networks are divided into a preferential one and an ordinary one. Specifically, the aerial and terrestrial networks can access the spectrum of the satellite network under the condition that the caused interference to the satellite terminal is below a certain threshold. Besides, considering that the aerial network has a higher priority than the terrestrial network, we aim to use a rate constraint to ensure the performance of the aerial network. Subject to these two constraints, we consider a sum-rate maximization for the terrestrial network by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors of the aerial and terrestrial base stations. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose a penalty-based iterative beamforming (PIBF) scheme that uses the penalty method and the successive convex approximation technique. Moreover, we also develop three low-complexity schemes by optimizing the normalized beamforming vectors and power control. Finally, we provide extensive numerical simulations to compare the performance of the proposed PIBF scheme and the low-complexity schemes. The results also demonstrate the advantages of the proposed HCSSA compared with the traditional cognitive spectrum sharing architecture.