ITSVA: Toward 6G-Enabled Vision Analytics over Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Network

The sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications system is expected to integrate the terrestrial and low Earth orbit satellite networks (LSN) to provide seamless global Internet service. This will create new opportunities for edge-assisted mobile vision analytics (MVA), which offloads frames over networks to edge servers for analysis, thereby overcoming the local computational resource constraints. With the integrated terrestrial and LSN (ITLSN), edge-assisted MVA can reach its full potential in remote and maritime areas. Nevertheless, the proximity of LEO satellites to the Earth is a double-edged sword. It offers benefits in latency and data rates but also brings challenges like frequent satellite handovers and volatile channel conditions. To demystify the in-the-wild performance of ITLSN, we carry out large-scale measurements with a major LSN service provider. The measurement results confirm the highly asymmetric and dynamic network performance of today's ITLSN, which can present non-trivial challenges for MVA frame offloading. We thus propose an ITLSN -adaptive MVA offloading framework, IT SVA, to address the inherent dynamics brought by network conditions, video content, and the offloading strategy. Extensive trace-driven simulation experiments are further conducted to verify the effectiveness of ITSVA.