Space Communication Network in the New Era: Architecture, Key Technologies, and Challenges

Space communication network (SCN) is a feasible and flexible solution to enable global seamless coverage, as well as service orchestration in a wide range. It's emerged as a promising perspective for the next-generation communication network. However, the design of SCN architecture with both efficiency and security remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a new system architecture for SCN, along with new hardware components, such as the collaborative edge gateway, the reconfigurable label-based switch, etc. Meanwhile, three core capabilities of the proposed architecture are elaborated, including structural collaborative security, efficient adaptive communication, and distributed service orchestration. Firstly, as for single node of SCN has weak security capability, the structural collaborative security aims to establish a strengthened security structure among nodes. Through security associations and strategy collaborations, nodes in the structure can cooperate to resist large-scale distributed attacks. Secondly, instead of fixed coverage and limited protocol exchange, the efficient adaptive communication introduces communication resource adaptation to realize on-demand resource scheduling, and introduces transmission protocol adaptation to support more heterogeneous connections. Thirdly, to solve the efficiency problem of centralized orchestration in a wide area, a smart agent with a learning-based Pattern-Matching Library is constructed, namely, a distributed component to execute near real-time service orchestration, which uses decomposing-based orchestration optimization to accomplish a lower service latency. In addition to the key technologies, some future research directions are also provided for enlightening the researchers.