MIMO Unmanned Surface Vessels Enabled Maritime Wireless Network Coexisting With Satellite Network: Beamforming and Trajectory Design

Due to the flexible deployment, unmanned surface vessels (USVs) have attracted much interest recently. To solve the resource scarcity problem at sea, USV needs to leverage existing terrestrial and satellite systems for efficient backhaul and spectrum sharing. In this case, the multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology can be applied for diversity gain improvement and interference coordination. However, how to adopt MIMO technology into maritime networks with a sparse scattering environment is still an open issue. In this paper, we employ a multi-antenna USV to support on-demand communications. Utilizing the two-ray channel, we aim to maximize the sum throughput over all USV intended users, by jointly optimizing the cooperative beamforming and trajectory, subject to several practical constraints, including the USV kinetics, quality of service requirement and backhaul capacity. Different from existing whole period designs, we decompose the problem into sequential one-slot problems. Within each slot, the non-convex problem is solved iteratively by using problem decomposition and successive convex optimization methods. Then, channel estimation errors are considered to investigate a robust beamforming scheme. Numerical simulations validate that the USV coexists well with the satellite network and show that the beamforming scheme and trajectory design complement each other for performance improvement.