The deployment of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites with terrestrial networks can potentially increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of relaying content from a data center to a set of edge caches hosted by 6G and beyond enabled macro base stations. In this work, the characteristics of the communication system and the mobility of LEO satellites are thoroughly discussed to describe the channel characteristics of LEO satellites, in terms of their frequency bands, latency, Doppler shifts, fading effects, and satellite access. Three different scenarios are proposed for the relay of data from data centers to edge caches via LEO satellites, which are the "Immediate Forward", "Relay and Forward", and "Store and Forward" scenarios. A comparative problem formulation is utilized to obtain numerical results from simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness and validity as well as the trade-offs of the proposed system model. The simulation results indicate that the integration of LEO satellites in edge caching for 6G and beyond networks decreased the required transmission power for relaying the data from the data center to the edge caches. Future research directions based on the proposed model are discussed.

翻译：低地球轨道（LEO）卫星与地面网络的融合，有望提高将内容从数据中心中继到由6G及未来网络赋能宏基站托管的边缘缓存集合的效率，并降低成本。本文深入探讨了通信系统的特性及LEO卫星的移动性，从频段、时延、多普勒频移、衰落效应及卫星接入等方面描述了LEO卫星的信道特征。提出了三种通过LEO卫星将数据从数据中心中继到边缘缓存的场景，即“即时转发”、“中继转发”和“存储转发”场景。采用对比问题公式化方法，通过仿真获取数值结果，以展示所提系统模型的有效性、可行性及权衡关系。仿真结果表明，在6G及未来网络的边缘缓存中集成LEO卫星，可降低将数据从数据中心中继到边缘缓存所需的传输功率。最后讨论了基于所提模型的未来研究方向。