LAUSR

Space-ground integrated networks (SGINs) have attracted substantial research interests due to their wide area coverage capability, where spectrum sharing is employed between the satellite and terrestrial networks for improving the spectral efficiency (SE). We further improve the SE by conceiving a cell-free system in SGINs, where the full-duplex (FD) multi-antenna APs simultaneously provide downlink and uplink services at the same time and within the same frequency band. Furthermore, power domain (PD) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is employed as the multiple access (MA) technique in the cell-free system. To achieve a performance enhancement, the sum-rate maximization problem is formulated for jointly optimizing the power allocation factors (PAFs) of the NOMA downlink (DL), the uplink transmit power, and both the beamformer of the satellite and of the APs. Successive convex approximation (SCA) and semi-definite programming (SDP) are adopted to transform the resultant non-convex problem into an equivalent convex one. Our simulation results reveal that 1) our proposed system outperforms the well-known approaches (i.e., frequency division duplex (FDD) and small cell systems) in terms of its SE; 2) our proposed optimization algorithm significantly improves the networking performance; 3) the conceived SIC order design outperforms the fixed-order design at the same complexity.