Satellite networks represent a fundamental component of global communication infrastructures, providing connectivity in remote, inaccessible, or poorly covered areas by terrestrial infrastructure: this is the topic addressed by Luca Fiscariello’s thesis, who obtained a master’s degree in computer engineering on February 27, 2024. Despite the significant impact of satellite networks, they face complex challenges. One of the key challenges that emerges in this context is the lack of resource virtualization in satellite networks, which presents several obstacles, limiting operational flexibility and the ability to respond in real-time to variations in traffic load. This lack of virtualization results in inefficiencies in resource allocation, making it difficult to optimize available bandwidth and dynamically manage Quality of Service (QoS).
The introduction of virtualization could revolutionize the landscape of satellite networks, enabling more efficient resource management, better adaptability to changing usage conditions, and the implementation of advanced services. In recent years, research has pushed heavily in this direction, seeking to identify new virtualization solutions. Regardless of the research objective, validating the conducted studies almost always requires recreating real scenarios in a virtual environment to study the effectiveness of a new communication protocol or to identify the best configuration that optimizes a certain number of metrics of interest. It would be convenient from this point of view to have an emulation tool that allows recreating a realistic satellite scenario based on real traffic. This idea has been realized in the thesis work.
The software developed for this thesis work seeks to address all these issues, combining easy installation with a pleasant user experience that allows recreating satellite scenarios and configuring them as desired. The platform allows recreating futuristic scenarios where, above the same physical infrastructure, it is possible to allocate multiple virtual networks that share the same hardware resources. Drawing from 5G terminology, this process is called network slicing. From an implementation perspective, the platform consists of a frontend developed in React, a backend that offers a series of services implemented in Node.js and Python, and a set of physical resources on which to activate virtualization. Some backend services have been implemented from scratch, while others are an extension and specialization of existing server functionalities.
The combined use of frontend and backend allows the configuration and allocation, on the reference physical infrastructure, of virtual resources such as machines and networks, on which to launch satellite emulation based on real traffic. Satellite emulation is made possible through OpenSAND, an open-source project that allows independently emulating individual satellite components. It will then be the platform’s responsibility to allocate the communication infrastructure and configure OpenSAND’s code appropriately for the emulation to start correctly.
Since the developed platform serves as a research tool, it is designed to allow the allocation of specific services on virtualized and emulated entities, thus enabling the recreation of realistic scenarios and conducting measurements, tests, and analyses. These services, through a highly modular architecture, can be activated and deactivated dynamically within the emulated entity. They can be encapsulated in containers or run as individual processes, depending on the use case.