Incentive Mechanism Design for Resource Management in Satellite Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Resource management is one of the challenges in satellite networks due to their high mobility, wide coverage, long propagation distances, and stringent constraints on energy, communication, and computation resources. Traditional resource allocation approaches rely only on hard and rigid system performance metrics. Meanwhile, incentive mechanisms, which are based on game theory and auction theory, investigate systems from the "economic" perspective in addition to the "system" perspective. Particularly, incentive mechanisms are able to take into account rationality and other behavior of human users into account, which guarantees benefits/utility of all system entities, thereby improving the scalability, adaptability, and fairness in resource allocation. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of incentive mechanism design for resource management in satellite networks. The paper covers key issues in the satellite networks, such as communication resource allocation, computation offloading, privacy and security, and coordination. We conclude with future research directions including learning-based mechanism design for satellite networks.