Distributed satellite cluster network is a novel structure in spatial information network. This paper investigates the spectrum-power tradeoff algorithm for distributed satellite cluster (DSC), which enables the master satellite (MS) to offload data traffic to the slave satellite (SS). The SS provides power resource to the master satellite users (MSUs) with bandwidth as compensation. The purpose of the proposed algorithm is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the SS while ensuring the QoS of the DSC. Considering data rate and bandwidth constraints of the MS, the SS jointly allocates bandwidth and power resources based on the served MSU set, meanwhile, data rate and power constraints of the SS should be also satisfied. We first prove that compensating bandwidth of a MSU can only be used by one slave satellite user. Then objective function is simplified to the equivalent subtractive form that can be solved by convex optimization method. Besides, we discuss the MSU selection conditions and employ them to the proposed spectrum-power tradeoff algorithm. The numerical results validate the performance improvement of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate the impact of power, bandwidth and data rate on the EE.

The DSCN scenario based on spectrum-power tradeoff. (Image by XIOPM)