Efficient Mappings of Service Function Chains at Terrestrial-Satellite Hybrid Cloud Networks

The great improvements in both satellite and terrestrial networks have motivated the academic and industrial communities to rethink their integration. As a result, there is an increasing interest on how to combine broadband satellite networks with the clean-slate terrestrial ones, especially with clouds leveraging SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) techniques, for better network openness, flexibility, elasticity and controllability. In this way, customized SFCs (Service Function Chaining) can be deployed at terrestrial and satellite ground segment clouds on demand, significantly reducing OPEX and CAPEX (Operational and Capital Expense). Nevertheless, how to efficiently leverage cloud substrate resources and deploy required SFCs is still challenging, as many issues such as system cost and revenue are involved. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on SFC mappings at SDN/NFV-based terrestrial and satellite ground clouds, and propose a related approach that considers both SF (Service Function) multiplexing and SFC merging, aiming to improve resource utilization efficiency of underlying substrate networks. Extensive simulations are performed and numerical results have verified benefits of the proposed SFC mapping approach.