Enhancing the Connectivity of Satellite IoT Devices in Terrestrial-Non terrestrial Integrated Networks based on the Stackelberg Game Approach

In this paper, we investigate the performance of non-terrestrial network in the game theoretic point of view. User equipment (UE) should transmit their status information or gathered data to terrestrial base station. As a baseline, UE tries to use satellites as a relay. If the satellite link is unavailable, UE determines whether it use terrestrial relay or not considering usage price. We formulate the optimization problem and obtain the optimal point by treating this problem as a Stackelberg game. Numerical results show the effectiveness of proposed solutions.