Service Coverage for Satellite Edge Computing

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal 2022-01, Vol.9 (1), p.695-705
• Main Authors: Li, Qing, Wang, Shangguang, Ma, Xiao, Sun, Qibo, Wang, Houpeng, Cao, Suzhi, Yang, Fangchun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer architecture; Edge computing; Internet of Things; Low earth orbit satellites; Low earth orbits; Optimization; Orbits; Robustness; Satellite constellations; Satellite edge computing (SEC); Satellites; service coverage; space-air-ground integrated networks; System dynamics
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3085129

Recently, increasing investments in satellite-related technologies make the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation a strong complement to terrestrial networks. To mitigate the limitations of the traditional satellite constellation "bent-pipe" architecture, satellite edge computing (SEC) has been proposed by placing computing resources at the LEO satellite constellation. Most existing works focus on space-air-ground integrated network architecture and SEC computing framework. Beyond these works, we are the first to investigate how to efficiently deploy services on the SEC nodes to realize robustness aware service coverage with constrained resources. Facing the challenges of spatial-temporal system dynamics and service coverage-robustness conflict, we propose a novel online service placement algorithm with a theoretical performance guarantee by leveraging Lyapunov optimization and Gibbs sampling. Extensive simulation results show that our algorithm can improve the service coverage by 4.3\times compared with the baseline.