Antenna Slewing Time Aware Mission Scheduling in Space Networks

The slow antenna slewing rate on data relay satellites is a main performance bottleneck for space networks. This letter investigates the antenna slewing time aware schedule problem aiming at maximizing the number of successful delivered missions. Particularly, we extend the traditional time-expanded graph into a new model, with which the impact of antenna slewing time on the serving sequence of antennas is well depicted. Then, we formulate the schedule problem into a mixed integer non-linear programming and propose a polynomial time algorithm to solve it. Simulation results show that our scheme can improve the number of successfully scheduled missions significantly while guaranteeing good fairness.