Network Availability Maximization for Free-Space Optical Satellite Communications

This letter considers availability maximized ground station (GS) selection for free-space optical (FSO) satellite networks, which is a challenging problem in the area of optical satellite communications. As a main contribution of this letter, we propose to address this problem from a new perspective of mathematical optimization. In particular, we advocate a gradient projection based algorithm after performing smoothing and relaxation on the original problem. Simulation results and complexity analysis show that, when compared to the conventional GS selection methods, the proposed scheme achieves a better tradeoff between network availability and computational complexity.