Abstract
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network is a cost-efficient way to achieve global covering for wide-area Internet of Things (IoT). As more and more IoT applications require large amounts of computing resources, cloud computing paradigm becomes one of the IoT’s main enablers. Abundant resources can be used to execute computation-intensive IoT applications in the cloud. Moreover, edge computing has emerged to alleviate the high latency and low bandwidth problem of cloud computing. The integration of edge computing into LEO networks (which is called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">LEC</i> in this paper) can improve satellite IoT network’s performance. In addition, it is an effective way to support delay-sensitive and resource-hungry wide-area IoT applications. However, there are many technical challenges for LEC, which is different from edge computing in terrestrial networks. Therefore, we study LEC in depth and a novel system architecture is proposed. A LEC prototype system is implemented which verifies our design. The simulation result demonstrates that LEC can improve system performance compared with cloud computing in LEO networks.
Highlights
Satellite network is a cost-efficient solution to solve many covering problems faced by terrestrial-based wide-area Internet of Things (IoT) [1]
The integration of edge computing [5] into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) networks can improve satellite IoT network’s performance by providing near-device processing capability
A system architecture is proposed for edge computing in LEO networks in this paper
Summary
Satellite network is a cost-efficient solution to solve many covering problems faced by terrestrial-based wide-area Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. The authors of [18] note that due to unique characteristics of satellite environment, one of the main challenges in this system is to accommodate massive random access (RA) requests of IoT devices while minimizing their energy consumptions In that paper, they focus on the reliable design and detection of RA preamble to effectively enhance the access efficiency in high-dynamic low-earth-orbit (LEO). If the user can access the terrestrial mobile network by ground BSs, he/she usually won’t access satellite network In this scenario, it is better to deploy edge computing resource near to the ground BSs. So there is no need to combine LEO network with cloud computing. The combination of LEO network and edge computing can alleviate the high latency and low bandwidth problem, because users can get computing service directly from satellites (LEC nodes). The network path between the users and the LEC node only include 1 satellite-ground link and probably a few intersatellite links
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