Orbital Edge Offloading on Mega-LEO Satellite Constellations for Equal Access to Computing

Mega-LEO satellite constellations are becoming a concrete reality. Companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and OneWeb have already started launching hundreds of LEO satellites and are turning their services on. Even if the aim of such LEO satellite constellations is just, for now, to offer worldwide Internet access equality, their deployment proves their feasibility and suggests usefulness for further purposes. In this article, we shed some light on the possible integration of the in-network computing paradigm in mega-LEO satellite constellations. Terrestrial and/or non-terrestrial nodes can benefit from offloading the computing to an orbital edge (OE) platform reachable through the satellite constellation, exploiting its fast and distributed computational capability. In this context, a preliminary analysis highlights that task offloading strategies can lead to performance improvements that open up novel challenges in the design and setup of OE platforms.