Service-Aware Resource Orchestration in Ultra-Dense LEO Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated 6G: A Service Function Chain Approach

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of the scale of deployed low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, the ultra-dense LEO satellite-terrestrial integrated network (LTIN) is envisioned as a promising architecture in the sixth-generation (6G) system to implement seamless connectivity and high-speed data rate service. Especially for ultra-remote real-time services with long transmission distance and high delay requirements, the integrated network can guarantee its end-to-end service continuity. However, many challenges have been posed to the efficient resource orchestration for the service delivery, owing to the large scale, heterogeneity and high mobility of the integrated network. For each service, its data needs to go through a series of on-board processing, before being downloaded to the terrestrial network for further applications. To this end, service function chain (SFC), an ordered concatenation of network functions (NFs), is introduced to support service provision. By allocating the constituent NFs over the LTIN, we propose an efficient multiple service delivery scheme to minimize the overall delivery completion latency, while taking into account resource sharing and competition among multiple SFCs. First, we formulate the multiple SFC embedding problem as a noncooperative game that is further proved as the weighted potential game with at least one Nash equilibrium (NE). With the help of the proposed global coordination mechanism, we design two algorithms to obtain the NE. One is the best response (BR) algorithm with faster convergence, while the other is adaptive play (AP) algorithm with more capacity for best solutions. Then, the stochastic learning (SL) algorithm is proposed to adapt to network dynamics and reduce global information exchange. Finally, extensive simulations validate the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.