Reconfiguration in Maritime Networks Integrated with Dynamic High Altitude Balloons

Nowadays, maritime communication has attracted more and more attention. To provide high-speed and low- cost communication in maritime networks, an efficient architecture and flexible routing are expected. In this paper, we propose a novel high altitude balloon-enabled maritime network (HABMN) architecture. In the proposed architecture, considering that high altitude platforms (HAPs) are difficult to maintain station-keeping in practice, we integrate dynamic balloon networks to guarantee maritime communication coverage. Then, we formulate an integer programming to maximize the total traffic accepted by whole networks over time. Considering the unpredictable link disruption caused by sea surface movement and wave occlusions, we update the network configurations to get optimal performance. However, frequent flow update will increase the burden on control channels and lower down system stability. Then, we propose a lazy policy (LP) to wisely determine whether to apply the optimal network configurations immediately or not. At last, extensive simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policy.