Multi-Satellite-Enabled Edge Computing: An Offloading and Computation Integration Approach

The computational capability and energy of user equipment (UE) is always facing new challenges, with the continuous and dramatic emergence of computation-intensive and latency-sensitive applications. low earth orbit (LEO) satellite-assisted/enabled edge computing aggregates powerful computational capabilities, provides new solutions to the problem of insufficient computing power and energy in UEs. In this paper, we propose a multi-satellite-enabled edge computing system, where satellites provide computation offloading services to terrestrial UEs. We design a joint offloading and computing resource allocation algorithm to offload tasks efficiently and utilize LEO satellites' computing resources rationally. The formulated problem is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem which aims to minimize system energy consumption. We decompose the original problem into three subproblems including user association, task scheduling, and computing resource allocation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces much system energy consumption effectively compared to benchmarks, validating the impact of rational allocation of computing resource on reducing system energy consumption.