SURPRISE – ESA CSC: Connectivity & Secure Communications

Objectives

Softwarization and virtualization are recent network technologies expected to be more and more adopted in next-generation networks and already intensively used in current terrestrial infrastructures, from cloud environments to mobile networks. They operate in synergy by decoupling network functionalities from the underlying hardware.

When used together, they allow the creation of software instances of network functions and digitalized services that were traditionally hard-coded into network equipment and most often tied to a specific manufacturer or model. The main objective of the project is to design, develop, and test fully virtualized ground software components that can be deployed, configured and scaled dynamically over shared infrastructures exploiting edge or cloud resources. Orchestration and network automation mechanisms can combine, manage and control such components, exploiting their open programmability, to build and deliver end-to-end services supported by both flexible high throughput satellites and terrestrial networks among multiple end-users and service providers.

The resulting virtualized platform is deemed fundamental to ease the creation procedure and management of Satellite Virtual Network Operators (SVNOs), through simplified north bound interfaces

to allow a complete while simple management of the terrestrial and satellite physical resources available.

Challenges

The application of the network virtualization and automation paradigms to the satellite is not straightforward, because resource “slicing” is more than a simple network partition. It needs an increased flexibility in the network management, for the satellite network operator, and an overall abstraction and virtualization of the complex physical infrastructure underneath, specifically extended to the satellite ground segment. The landscape is further complicated by considering that the satellite standpoint is often based on legacy or proprietary technologies, software and hardware, quite far from terrestrial networks with additional challenges related to virtualization techniques, deployment constraints and programmability.

System Architecture

The main output of the project is a demonstrator based on COTS hardware making extensive use of open source solutions, divided into three macro subsystems:

the Management and Orchestration (MANO) component, including GUI for multi-domain service configuration and monitoring capabilities.
the virtualized Satellite components. Due to the lack of open/available implementations fully oriented to softwarization, this subsystem is based on the OpenSand SatCom emulation, introducing several customization, providing the implementation of a realistic satellite system. The main idea is to exploit the components provided by OpenSand for enabling the satellite network elements as virtual entities to be involved in the communication emulation.
the terrestrial emulation component with the dynamic management of the (virtual) terrestrial infrastructure.

Among the Orchestrator (1) and the multi-domain network emulators (2 and 3), a standardized Software (Verification) Interface, namely SVI, is defined. The high-level system architecture is represented in figure.