Collaborative Transmission in Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Networks: Design and Implementation

With the rapid development of 5G technology, there is an increasing demand of high-definition (HD) video service, so that efficient content transmission is expected to guaranteed the quality of experience of users. However, traditional terrestrial networks can hardly support this kind of service due to the limited coverage and capability especially in scene of remote area or peak hours of hotspots. Under the support of High Throughput Satellite, satellite can serve as a supplement in hybrid satellite-terrestrial networks (HSTN) to provide various of services. Specifically, aggregation in packet level for collaborative transmission between satellite and terrestrial networks is in direction of development which should be reconsidered. In this paper, a classic SDN-aware HSTN architecture is adopted to capture content information of the system and make strategy dynamically for efficient distribution of content in finer scale. Key technologies, including tag method, path selection strategy and reordering scheme, are proposed to achieve collaborative transmission of HD videos. Finally, complete implementation of a prototype, a Hardware In the Loop (HIL) platform with the SITL module of OPNET, is built to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solutions. Numerical results show that collaborative transmission in HSTN can effectively realize link aggregation, which has great significance for complex conditions in future networks.