Energy-Efficient and QoS-Aware Computation Offloading in GEO/LEO Hybrid Satellite Networks

Benefiting from advanced satellite payload technologies, edge computing servers can be deployed on satellites to achieve orbital computing and reduce the mission processing delay. However, geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites are hindered by long-distance communication, whereas low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are restricted by time windows. Relying solely on GEO or LEO satellites cannot meet the strict quality of service (QoS) requirements of on-board missions while conserving energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a computation offloading strategy for GEO/LEO hybrid satellite networks that minimizes total energy consumption while guaranteeing the QoS requirements of multiple missions. We first innovatively transform the on-board partial computation offloading problem, which is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, into a minimum cost maximum flow (MCMF) problem. Then, the successive shortest path-based computation offloading (SSPCO) method is introduced to obtain the offloading decision in polynomial time. To evaluate the effectiveness and performance of SSPCO, we conduct a series of numerical experiments and compare SSPCO with other offloading methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SSPCO outperforms the reference methods in terms of total energy consumption, QoS violation degree, and algorithm running time.