Reverse Auction for Cloud-Based Traffic Offloading in Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

The hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks (HSTNs) are expected to support extremely high traffic demands. In HSTN, cellular cells and satellite network are operated by the mobile network operator (MNO) and the satellite network operator respectively, traffic offloading strategies need to be designed via jointly considering the throughput of HSTN and economic profits of MNO. In this paper, a reverse auction with cell grouping (RA-CG) scheme is proposed for cloud-based traffic offloading in HSTN. Firstly, a HSTN model is constructed and the problem of co-channel interference is analyzed. Then, an auction model is adopted to analyze the economic profits of traffic offloading in HSTN, and the optimization problem is formulated to maximize the profits of MNO. Following that, a Hungarian-based reverse auction (HRA) algorithm is designed to find the optimal cell-satellite association solution in terms of the economic profits within each interference-free group, which is obtained by a cell grouping method. Simulation results show that the proposed RA-CG scheme can not only maximize the profits of MNO and improve the network offloading rate, but also achieve higher spectrum efficiency.