SDN-enabled SatCom networks for satellite-terrestrial integration

Abstract

Key features of satellite communications such as wide-scale coverage, broadcast/multicast support and high availability, together with significant amounts of new satellite capacity coming online, anticipate new opportunities for satellite communications services to become an integral part of upcoming 5G systems. This chapter examines the realization of end-to-end (E2E) traffic engineering (TE) in a combined terrestrial-satellite network embracing software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. The focus is placed on a mobile backhaul network scenario where a satellite component is used to complement the terrestrial infrastructure in a way that E2E paths across both satellite and terrestrial links can be centrally computed and rearranged dynamically at flow-level granularity in front of link congestion and failure events. The chapter describes the architecture of such SDN-enabled satellite ground segment system and presents illustrative TE workflows. Furthermore, sustained in the proposed architectural framework, an SDN-based TE application for hybrid satelliteterrestrial backhaul networks is developed and its performance assessed under diverse scenario conditions.