Flexible Resource Allocation and Path Reconfiguration Strategies for eMBB and mMTC Services in a LEO Satellite Topology

6G; eMBB; Flexible Resource Allocation; LEO satellites; mMTC; Network Slicing; Satellite Network; 6g; Enhanced mobile broadband; Flexible resource allocation; Flexible resources; Low earth orbit satellites; Machinetype communication (MTC); Massive machine-type communication; Mobile broadband; Network slicing; Resources allocation; Satellite network; Automotive Engineering; Aerospace Engineering; Computer Networks and Communications; Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Abstract :

[en] The integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) plays a key role in 6G networks to provide ubiquitous connectivity and heterogeneous services with distinct quality of service (QoS) requirements, including enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and massive machine-type communication (mMTC). The eMBB services require continuous data streaming and are bandwidth-intensive compared to mMTC requests that are bursty and have a stringent latency requirement. Network slicing (NS) is the key technological enabler to realize these requirements by provisioning various services over the same physical infrastructure. NS has been a paradigm shift in the terrestrial networks (TNs), but having efficient NS in the NTNs is still a major challenge due to the dynamic nature of NTNs. In this paper, we consider NS in an integrated low earth orbit (LEO)-terrestrial network. In particular, we propose a flexible resource allocation framework and introduce a multi scale time slot concept to efficiently cater to mMTC and eMBB services considering the very fast variation of LEO topology. We formulate the resource optimization as a mixed integer linear pro gramming (MILP) with the objective to maximize the number of served requests while considering practical network constraints related to slices’ QoS requirements. To tackle the expensive computational complexity of the original optimization problem, a successive convex approximation (SCA) based iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the binary-relaxed problem. Furthermore, we introduce a path reconfiguration strategy (PRS) to minimize the path reconfiguration for eMBB requests. The PRS does not recompute paths if the routing path still exists in the next time slot for an eMBB request continuing for more than one time slot. The simulation results reveal that the proposed SCA-based algorithm outperforms the benchmark schemes in terms of percentage of mMTCandeMBBserved requests, as well as the reconfiguration reduction offered by the proposed PRS strategy.

Disciplines :

Electrical & electronics engineering

Author, co-author :

MUHAMMAD, Ahsan ^✱; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SigCom

VU, Thang Xuan ^✱; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SigCom

CHATZINOTAS, Symeon ^✱; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > SigCom

^✱ These authors have contributed equally to this work.

External co-authors :

Language :

English

Title :

Flexible Resource Allocation and Path Reconfiguration Strategies for eMBB and mMTC Services in a LEO Satellite Topology

Publication date :

23 July 2025

Journal title :

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

ISSN :

0018-9545

Publisher :

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Pages :

1-12

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Additional URL :

http://xplorestaging.ieee.org/ielx8/25/4356907/11091526.pdf?arnumber=11091526

Funders :

Luxembourg National Research Fund

Available on ORBilu :

since 24 October 2025

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