SFC Enabled Data Delivery for Ultra-Dense LEO Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Network

Abstract

Recently, the rapid-developed mega low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation has shown its great potential in cooperating with terrestrial networks to provide seamless global connectivity and high-speed data rate services. However, the heterogeneity of physical resources and diversity of service demands pose challenges for delivering service in an efficient way in the ultra-dense LEO satellite-terrestrial integrated networks (LTIN). When implementing service delivery, service data generally needs a series of on-board processing and then downloading to the terrestrial network for further applications. In this paper, we introduce service function chain (SFC), a sequence of network functions, to process the data on board and propose an efficient multiple service delivery scheme in the LTIN to minimize the total delivery completion time. Considering the heterogeneous resource sharing and competition among multiple SFCs, we formulate the problem as a noncooperative game, which is further proved as a weighted potential game. We design an improved response (IR) algorithm with fast convergence and an adaptive play (AP) algorithm to find the best Nash equilibrium (NE). Extensive simulation results validate the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.