A Game-Theoretic Approach to Computation Offloading in Satellite Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is proposed as a new paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation requirements, which is caused by the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As a supplement to the terrestrial network, satellites can provide communication to terrestrial devices in some harsh environments and natural disasters. Satellite edge computing is becoming an emerging topic and technology. In this paper, a game-theoretic approach to the optimization of computation offloading strategy in satellite edge computing is proposed. The system model for computation offloading in satellite edge computing is established, considering the intermittent terrestrial-satellite communication caused by satellites orbiting. We conduct a computation offloading game framework and compute the response time and energy consumption of a task based on the queuing theory as metrics of optimizing performance. The existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium is theoretically proved, and an iterative algorithm is proposed to find the Nash equilibrium. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithm and show that the game-based offloading strategy can greatly reduce the average cost of a device.