Elastic Resilience for Software-Defined Satellite Networking: Challenges, Solutions, and Open Issues

© 1999-2012 IEEE. Satellite networks have long been regarded as a key enabler for ubiquitous Internet access and global data distribution. However, since they are highly dynamic and much more vulnerable to various failures, how to detour traffic around fault satellites and interrupted links becomes an important but challenging issue. Thanks to the emerging software-defined networking, great controllability can be introduced to the satellite networks for agile management and automation. Hence, in this article, we focus on elastic resilience for software-defined satellite networking, and propose a preliminary solution to cope with the related fundamental challenges in guarantees of controller reachability, collections of network status, and failure detection and recovery. We also discuss several key open issues to be urgently addressed, hoping to shed some light on this promising land.