We study the area target scheduling problem in satellite networks, aiming at maximizing coverage ratio whilst minimizing response time. To balance these two conflicting objectives, we consider their weighted sum and formulate an integer programming problem. By leveraging this problem's underlying structure, we equivalently decompose it into two nested subproblems. We then propose an approximation algorithm that is shown to have 1 - e(-1) performance bound. Finally, our simulation results show that the maximum performance loss is within 8% over a wide range of weights between the coverage ratio and the response time.

Area target scheduling; satellite networks; linear programming; constant approximation bound

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