Ultra-Dense LEO Satellite Offloading for Terrestrial Networks: How Much to Pay the Satellite Operator?

Recently, the ultra-dense low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation over high-frequency band has served as a potential solution for terrestrial data offloading owing to its seamless coverage and high-capacity backhaul. In this paper, we consider an integrated ultra-dense LEO-based satellite-terrestrial network where the terrestrial operator (TO) can offload its subscribed users to the LEO satellite network owned by the satellite operator (SO) for satellite-backhauled network access. However, data offloading consumes extra resources of the SO and degrades the quality-of-service of the SO's original users. Therefore, we aim to design a pricing mechanism based on the Stackelberg game to motivate both operators for data offloading, and the Stackelberg equilibrium is achieved by jointly optimizing the C-band user association, Ka-band spectrum allocation, and data service pricing. Simulation results show that our proposed pricing mechanism can motivate two operators for offloading efficiently. The influence of available frequency resources, data service prices, and the number of LEO satellites on the system performance are also discussed.