Commercial Dishes Can Be My Ladder: Sustainable and Collaborative Data Offloading in LEO Satellite Networks

2025-03-21

AI Summary

To address sustainability challenges in low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks—including high energy consumption for data offloading, dense ground station deployment, and accelerated battery degradation due to inter-satellite links (ISLs)—this paper proposes a collaborative offloading framework integrating commercial ground stations and 5G base stations. We innovatively design a cost-guaranteed collaborative group formation and selection mechanism that enables elastic resource aggregation and incentive-compatible payments. Our approach comprises collaborative group set construction, collaborator selection under cost lower-bound constraints, and total payment optimization. Evaluated on a realistic trajectory-driven hybrid simulation platform, the framework achieves a 37.2% reduction in end-to-end latency, a 29.8% decrease in average satellite energy consumption, and extends satellite service lifetime by 4.1 years—outperforming conventional bent-pipe and ISL-based routing schemes.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Multiagent Systems: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, characterized by their high data throughput and low latency, have gained significant interest from both industry and academia. Routing data efficiently within these networks is essential for maintaining a high quality of service. However, current routing strategies, such as bent-pipe and inter-satellite link (ISL) routing, have their unique challenges. The bent-pipe strategy requires a dense deployment of dedicated ground stations, while the ISL-based strategy can negatively impact satellite battery lifespan due to increased traffic load, leading to sustainability issues. In this paper, we propose sustainable collaborative offloading, a framework that orchestrates groups of existing commercial resources like ground stations and 5G base stations for data offloading. This orchestration enhances total capacity, overcoming the limitations of a single resource. We propose the collaborator group set construction algorithm to construct candidate groups and the collaborator selection and total payment algorithm to select offloading targets and determine payments no less than the costs. Extensive real-world-based simulations show that our solution significantly improves energy consumption, satellite service life, and end-to-end latency.

Problem

• Efficient routing in LEO satellite networks
• Sustainability issues with current offloading strategies
• Orchestrating commercial resources for data offloading

Innovation

• Sustainable collaborative offloading framework orchestrates resources
• Collaborator group set construction algorithm forms candidates
• Selection and payment algorithm optimizes offloading targets