Integrated Environment Sensing and Green Communication for Non-Terrestrial Network

Abstract

The functions of location information and data communication were developed separately in conventional system designs. For example, the Global Positioning System (GPS) provides geo-location information for devices or receivers while terrestrial wireless communication systems, such as fifth generation (5G) wireless networks, provide qualified communication services within the deployed coverage. However, with the fast development of joint service requirements, the issue of using integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) to efficiently and flexibly utilize limited resources in accordance with changes to the environments has become a critical problem for the future sixth generation (6G) wireless communications. One possible architecture for the 6G wireless systems, i.e., a non-terrestrial network (NTN), is to merge the operations of conventional terrestrial wireless systems with aerial platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and low earth orbit (LEO) satellites to have the advantages of ubiquitous, scalable, and flexible services for future communication requirements. In this paper, an integrated environment sensing and efficient energy consumption or green communication via adopting shadowing properties of the deployed regions is proposed. With the proposed method, a terrestrial base station (BS) or a UAV can be aware of the deployed environments and use the shadowing features to determine the proper transmitted power. It can satisfy green communication requirements and avoid unnecessary energy waste. The proposed integrated method was evaluated using computer simulations to demonstrate the anticipated performance. Results show that with the proposed method, NTN can have the ability to sense the environment and reduce unnecessary energy waste significantly.