Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Edge Computing Networks: Architecture, Challenges, and Open Issues

STN has been considered a novel network architecture to accommodate a variety of services and applications in future networks. Being a promising paradigm, MEC has been regarded as a key technology-enabler to offer further service innovation and business agility in STN. However, most of the existing research in MEC enabled STN regards a satellite network as a relay network, and the feasibility of tasks processing directly on the satellites is largely ignored. Moreover, the problem of multi-layer edge computing architecture design and heterogeneous edge computing resource co-scheduling, have not been fully considered. Therefore, different from previous works, in this article, we propose a novel architecture named STECN, in which computing resources exist in multi-layer heterogeneous edge computing clusters. The detailed functional components of the proposed STECN are discussed, and we present the promising technical challenges, including meeting QoE requirements, cooperative computation offloading, multi-node task scheduling, mobility management and fault/failure recovery. Finally, some potential research issues for future research are highlighted.