A Service Function Chain Deployment Scheme of the Software Defined Satellite Network

The aim of this study was to reduce the influence of highly dynamic substrate network topology and large transmission delay caused by long communication distance between satellites and ground in Software Defined Satellite Networks (SDSNs), and a Partial Observation Markov Decision Process (POMDP)-based service function chain (SFC) deployment scheme of SDSN is proposed. Under this SDSN architecture, the network topology changes could be obtained through the SDN centralized control ability. Due to the topology changes, which may cause inevitable observation errors and transmission delays, the complete actual topology and network states cannot be obtained in real time. Thus, we put forward a POMDP model–based SFC deployment scheme, and an approximate iterative algorithm to solve the problem, aiming at optimizing the end-to-end network delay in the SDSN. The simulation results show that our model can optimize the delay of SFC deployment process, and improve the resource utilization and network throughput of the SDSN.