Service aware network tuning improves disaster recovery connectivity
Offline-Tuned Service-Aware TN-NTN Feeder Allocation for 6G Post-Disaster Service Resilience
Networking and Internet Architecture
Summary
Disasters can break ground-based cell networks and overload the remaining stations, making it harder to keep emergency services running. The authors study a way to use satellite networks smartly when ground networks fail. They tune how satellite feeder capacity is shared offline, focusing on priority services during outages. Their approach improves emergency service continuity, especially in severe failures, by making better use of satellite links without needing online AI controllers.
What this means in practice
- •For cellular network operators: Optimize satellite feeder capacity offline to maintain emergency connectivity during total ground network outages.
- •For satellite communication engineers: Design feeder link resource allocation schemes that prioritize critical services for post-disaster network fallback scenarios.
Authors
Donglin Wang, Anjie Qiu, Qiuheng Zhou, Hans D. Schotten
Abstract
Terrestrial network (TN) failures during disasters can overload surviving base stations (BSs) and disrupt emergency services. A non-terrestrial network (NTN) provides fallback, but its feeder link can become a bottleneck as users migrate. This paper studies post-disaster network resilience through service-priority-aware orchestration of constrained NTN feeder capacity in a post-failure snapshot. A lightweight Cross-Entropy Method (CEM) tunes feeder, offload, and user-ranking parameters offline, not as an online artificial intelligence (AI) controller. A Python system-level simulator sweeps operating regions under abstract TN-NTN link and queueing models. Gains depend on failure severity. At a 180-Mbps feeder under total TN outage, the proposed policy increases the absolute emergency-weighted continuity metric Cemg from 0.399 to 0.666 relative to the matched rule baseline with uniform feeder scaling (paired gain: 0.267; 95% bootstrap CI: [0.264, 0.271]); mild damage can reduce aggregate continuity. Offline CEM feeder-weight tuning further improves severe-failure continuity over fixed service priorities, whereas tuned offload and user ranking provide no detectable incremental gain.