A Game-Theoretic Access Strategy for Satellite Edge Computing enabled Massive IoT Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) with computing capability has been extensively deployed in many remote areas that lack terrestrial network coverage. Satellite edge computing (SatEC) networks are being considered as a promising technology to provide computing services in these areas. How to coordinate such massive IoT devices to access the network is one of the most challenging issues in SatEC networks. However, most of the existing access strategies are designed for a predetermined number of IoT devices and cannot be directly applied to practical scenarios with an indeterminate number of devices. Meanwhile, the calculation of the satellite remaining service time only adopts the simple assumption that the satellite is in an orbit that passes directly above the device, which is not applicable to any other general orbits. To address the above issues, in this work, we first define a concept of satellite remaining service time for any orbit, then formulate this edge computing service access strategy as a Poisson game. By taking the remaining service time, computing task queue of each satellite, and transmission power attenuation of IoT devices into account the equilibrium resolving, we obtain an optimal edge computing service access strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the connection keeping rate between ground devices and satellites by 53.34% and decrease the access failure probability by 80.96% compared with other access strategies.