Network-Slicing-Enabled Computation Offloading in Satellite-Terrestrial Edge Computing Networks: A Bi-Level Game Approach

Satellite-terrestrial edge computing network (STECN) is emerging as a novel computation paradigm that enables a fashion of on-orbit computation, accommodating real-time processing of various types of computation tasks within a wider area. However, STECNs are incapable of meeting the diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of various computational tasks without deploying dedicated infrastructures tailored to each type of task. Therefore, we studied the problem of joint network slicing and task offloading, which is modeled as a problem with a two-layer structure. At the higher level, slice tenants optimize their profits by determining resource allocations from the STECN, while at the lower layer, the users within each network slice maximize their utilities by deciding their offloading policies. In light of the complexity and the intricate interplay of these two problems, a multileader-disjoint-follower bi-level game is proposed. We show that both the leader’s game and the followers’ game admit at least one Nash equilibrium (NE). We then proposed two distributed algorithms that could prove to converge to the NE of these two games, respectively, without revealing any private information of all stakeholders. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms through extensive simulations, and the results demonstrate that our algorithms converge to the NE rapidly and can achieve superior performance gains compared with some known benchmarks.