Quantum satellite networks offer a promising solution for achieving long-distance quantum communication by enabling entanglement distribution across global scales. This work formulates and solves the quantum satellite network scheduling problem by optimizing satellite-to-ground station pair assignments under realistic system and environmental constraints. Our framework accounts for limited satellite and ground station resources, fairness, entanglement fidelity thresholds, and real world non-idealities including atmospheric losses, weather and background noise. In addition, we incorporate the complexities of multi-satellite relays enabled via inter-satellite links. We propose an integer linear programming (ILP) based optimization framework that supports multiple scheduling objectives, allowing us to analyze tradeoffs between maximizing total entanglement distribution rate and ensuring fairness across ground station pairs. Our framework can also be used as a benchmark tool to measure the performance of other potential transmission scheduling policies.

翻译：量子卫星网络通过实现全球尺度的纠缠分发，为长距离量子通信提供了一种前景广阔的解决方案。本研究在现实系统与环境约束下，通过优化卫星与地面站配对分配，构建并求解了量子卫星网络调度问题。我们的框架综合考虑了卫星与地面站资源限制、公平性、纠缠保真度阈值，以及大气损耗、天气和背景噪声等实际非理想因素。此外，我们还引入了通过星间链路实现的多卫星中继复杂性。我们提出了一种基于整数线性规划（ILP）的优化框架，支持多种调度目标，使我们能够分析最大化总纠缠分发速率与确保地面站对间公平性之间的权衡。该框架还可作为基准工具，用于评估其他潜在传输调度策略的性能。