User Experience-Oriented Content Caching for Low Earth Orbit Satellite-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

• Published in: Electronics (Basel) Vol. 14; no. 12; p. 2413
• Main Authors: He, Jianhua, Zhao, Youhan, Ma, Yonghua, Wang, Qiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 13.06.2025
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Artificial satellites; Caching; Data transmission; Design; Edge computing; Effectiveness; Energy consumption; Low earth orbit satellites; Low earth orbits; Mobile computing; Quality of service; Rocket launches; Satellite communications; Satellites; Unmanned aerial vehicles; User experience
• ISSN: 2079-9292; 2079-9292
• DOI: 10.3390/electronics14122413

In this paper, we investigate a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite-enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) network, where multiple cache-enabled LEO satellites are deployed to address heterogeneous content requests from ground users. To evaluate the network’s capability in meeting user demands, we adopt the average quality of experience (QoE) of the users as the performance metric, defined based on the effective transmission rate under communication interference. Our analysis reveals that the average QoE is determined by the content caching decisions at the satellites, thereby allowing us to formulate an average QoE maximization problem, subject to practical constraints on the satellite caching capacity. To tackle this NP-hard problem, we design a two-stage content caching algorithm that combines divide-and-conquer and greedy policies for efficient solution. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared with several benchmark schemes, our algorithm achieves notable improvements in terms of the average QoE while significantly reducing caching costs, particularly under resource-constrained satellite settings.