# Offloading of Atomic Tasks in Satellite Networks:
## 1 Introduction  
Space-Terrestrial integration [1] is one of the basic national defense strategies for all countries in the future. As an important national information infrastructure, the integration of heaven and earth can realize the real-time interconnection of multifunctional satellites or satellite groups and closely integrate the resources of the sky, air, earth, ships, and islands. The future development of the Space-Terrestrial information network will need to cross the sky and earth platforms to realize the integrated management of space and earth resources. The existing Space-Terrestrial network management system is mainly completed on ground control center [2]. The ground control center mainly focuses on situational awareness, navigation, positioning, and satellite communication. The spacecraft are networked through various satellite networks with different functions to achieve global coverage of information interaction and mission processing capabilities [3]. As shown in Figure 1, the network control center is the pivot for directing the work of the satellites. The control center uses multiple computers to command and monitor the operation of the satellite, which responds to various commands from the satellite, arranging satellite work procedures, controlling satellite operating attitude, directing sensor work and information transmission, controlling onboard instruments and ground receiving stations to work cooperatively, etc. The various tasks on the space-based network are first broken down and calculated at the control center [4, 5]. The instructions are sent to the satellite through the ground base station when there exists a visible time window between the satellite andthe ground base station, then the satellite performs the relevant operations after receiving the instructions to complete the tasks. As shown in Figure 1, blocks with different colors represent the different tasks in the request queue received by satellite. With the explosive growth of multimedia services and the emergence of new space missions, many requests can in turn be sent to the satellite when there is a visible time window between the satellite and the ground base station [5]. Therefore, it is difficult to guarantee the efficiency and real-time performance of existing space-based management methods. With the gradual increase in reliance on space-based information network services across industries and escalating and increasing commercial and military demands, \"rapid response\" and \"efficient service\" are fundamental aspects that require attention [5]. In spatial information networks, it is challenging to achieve fast resource allocation and high resource utilization with scarce dynamic satellite resources without reliable technical support for resource management [6]. With the explosive growth of multimedia services and the emergence of new space missions, the existing spatial information system management methods can no longer satisfy the high efficiency and real-time multitasking requirements for improving the response speed of satellite networks and increasing inter-satellite resource utilization [7]. With the rapid development of edge computing and the gradual maturity of related methods, most researchers are increasingly applying the ideas of edge computing to satellite networks. Task offloading is a crucial technology for edge computing. Task offloading transfers terminal tasks to the edge cloud environment and provides resources for resource-constrained devices. Task offloading can be summarized in two phases. First, tasks with high resource requirements are reasonably assigned to proxy satellites with sufficient resources for processing [8]. Then the computation results are retrieved from the proxy satellites. Different factors can affect the whole process, such as radio channel communication, backhaul connection quality, device performance, cloud server availability, etc. [9].