HF skywave communication for air-to-ground networks: A cooperative transmission framework

High-Frequency (HF) communication is widely used for long-distance transmission in remote and disaster areas. However, the dynamic nature of the ionosphere and multipath propagation in the HF channel pose significant challenges to designing efficient and robust communication systems. In this paper, we propose a Fixed Station (FS) and frequency matching method, as well as a power allocation method, to improve the sum-rate of air-to-ground HF communication networks. We derive optimal power allocation among users that share the same frequency, based on which a modified water-filling algorithm is used to solve the power allocation problem in multi-user scenarios, while a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to solve the integer optimization problem of frequency-FS matching. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the naive algorithm, indicating its effectiveness.