SECTest: An Integrated Testing Platform for QoS in Satellite Edge Clouds

With the advancement of satellite computing capabilities, the diversity of satellite communication services imposes varied quality of service (QoS) requirements. Limited satellite resources necessitate remote deployment and updates of running services for QoS testing, increasing testing difficulty. Existing testing tools are limited in functionality or reliant on specific infrastructures, failing to meet the QoS testing needs of edge cloud services in mobile satellite scenarios. In this paper, we present SECTest, an integrated testing platform for QoS in satellite edge clouds. More precisely, SECTest can integrate changes in satellite network topology, create and manage satellite edge cloud cluster testing environments on heterogeneous edge devices, customize experiments for users, support deployment and scaling of various integrated testing tools, provide test data persistence function to manage data life cycle and store data hierarchically, and publish and visualize test results. We have built a real satellite edge cloud cluster based on Kubernetes, integrating both physical and virtual machines, and deploying a variety of integrated testing tools using containerization technology. Currently, we have evaluated the quality of service in terms of processing latency, packet drop rate, throughput, and average response time for object detection microservice applications, web microservice applications, and data transfer tasks. To demonstrate SECTest's scalability in testing network communication protocols, we evaluated the performance of HTTP and gRPC in microservice communication within the cluster. Our experimental results validate SECTest's ability to test key service quality metrics in a real satellite edge cloud cluster.