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

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.