Integrating Edge Computing into Low Earth Orbit Satellite Networks: Architecture and Prototype

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 LEC 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.