Link Quality-Aware Handover Planning for Space-Aerial-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

Space-aerial-terrestrial integrated networks (SATINs) have gained widespread recognition. Due to the mobility of wireless access points (APs) and user terminals (UTs), handover plays an essential role in ensuring the continuity and quality of communication in SATINs. However, existing handover strategies only consider the instantaneous communication benefits, which makes it difficult to maintain link stability with lower handover frequency. Given that reasonable handover paths help improve the stability of communication, we propose a handover planning (HP) strategy in SATINs, which fully considers the time varying link quality between two handover in planning the handover paths of mobile UTs. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HP strategy can maintain high-quality communication links with the lowest handover delay while performing relatively low in handover frequency.