Earth Stations deployment for maximizing system throughput in Satellite/Solar-Powered Mesh Integrated Network

After a disaster strikes, the disaster victims usually become isolated and unable to utilize communication services for an extended period of time. Therefore, it is essential to establish a communication network that can operate when there is no power or infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on Satellite/Solar-powered Mesh Integrated Networks (SMIN), which are composed of a communication satellite, Earth Stations (ESs) and solar-powered Mesh Routers (MRs). A SMIN can connect to external networks via satellite and provide communication services in a large area through the wireless mesh network (WMN). To maximize the amount of communication traffic from the WMN, we aim to optimize the number of ESs and its deployment. When the number of ESs increases, the hop count between a MR and its closest ES decreases, thus resulting in an improved connectivity in the route. However, since the ESs share the bandwidth of satellite, allocated bandwidth to each ES decreases as the number of ESs increases. Therefore, we aim to optimize the number and deployment pattern of ESs. Additionally, we validate the amount of aggregated traffic that can be sent to the satellite through numerical analysis.