Content Service Oriented Resource Allocation for Space–Air–Ground Integrated 6G Networks: A Three-Sided Cyclic Matching Approach

Since the existing terrestrial fifth generation (5G) network has limited coverage, it is difficult to meet the growing demand for seamless network connection. Meanwhile, current network resource allocation methods mainly research on how to improve system performance only from the perspective of resource utilization, but rarely take users’ specific needs for network content into consideration. This brings severe challenges to efficient network service and flexible resource allocation. Therefore, we construct the content service-oriented resource allocation model for space–air–ground integrated sixth generation networks (SAGIN 6G), and formulate the three-sided matching issue among the space–air–ground integrated network equipment (SAGINE), content sources, and users. In this model, users request to establish connection with SAGIN which forwards users’ request to content service provider (CSP). CSP manages the creation of content data, and finally returns the requested content to users through SAGIN. For the content service-oriented resource allocation in SAGIN, finding the optimal stable three-sided matching with the largest cardinality is an NP-complete problem. Therefore, to efficiently solve the above issue, we design some reasonable restrictions and convert it to a restricted three-sided matching problem with size and cycle preferences. We further develop the content-oriented resource allocation algorithm (COR2A) and the user-oriented resource allocation algorithm (UOR2A) in a distributed manner. Extensive simulations verify our approach outperforms traditional benchmark resource allocation schemes in terms of system throughput, CSP revenue, and user experience.