Poster: An Efficient Control Framework for Supporting the Future SDN/NFV-enabled Satellite Network

Control framework design is critical to future SDN/NFV-enabled satellite network. However, the current multi-layer constellation based solutions have drawbacks in terms of availability, latency, openness, etc. The key contribution in this work is the study of an efficient control framework, which logically consists of two parts: entity part and overlay part. The entity part is a novel heterogeneous single-layer LEO satellite network, while the overlay part implements a virtualized overlay network. We have implemented a lightweight prototype of our framework and compared it with a GEO satellite based solution (i.e. OpenSAN). We demonstrate proof-of-concept that our framework performs better than OpenSAN with respect to control latency and avoids potential system bottleneck.