Computation offloading and energy harvesting schemes for sum rate maximization in space-air-ground networks

The space-air-ground (SAG) integrated networks will play a major role in the sixth generation (6G) mobile networks, which will provide global coverage, full connection and pervasive intelligence services for multiple ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Moreover, massive computing tasks can be either performed by local devices, or offloaded to edge servers, such as low orbit satellites, high altitude platforms (HAPs) and remote base stations. Nevertheless, the joint computation and communication resource allocation solutions are becoming challenging due to the large-scale state space, time-varying network scenarios, and limited battery capacity. In this paper, we propose a SAG-integrated three-layer heterogenous network model to maximize the sum-rate of ground IoT devices, which further enhances the deep integration of communication and computation resources. Additionally, we develop a Lyapunov-assisted multi-agent proximal policy optimization algorithm to process the task scheduling, HAP selection, battery harvesting, and CPU cycle frequency optimization. Extensive simulation results corroborate that the proposed method has superior performance gains in terms of the remaining battery capacity, energy consumption, and maximum average sum-rate compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.