Service Delivery Models for Converged Satellite-Terrestrial 5G Network Deployment: A Satellite-Assisted CDN Use-Case

The current shift toward the virtualization of net- work infrastructure components enables a dynam- ic instantiation, deployment and configuration of virtual network functions (VNFs), which can be offered “as-a-service” to multiple tenants, thus enabling 5G architectures. Simultaneously, the recent high throughput satellite (HTS) systems can play an important role in the 5G era thanks to their characteristics, such as their large coverage, fast deployment of the ground infrastructure and native broadcast/multicast broadband capabili- ties. In this context, this paper proposes a review of the satellite service delivery models in order to identify viable alternatives to deploy converged satellite-terrestrial services. This objective is pur- sued by taking as a reference a satellite-assisted IP streaming service for the enhancement of current Content Delivery Network (CDN) infrastructures, as tackled by the European Space Agency within the SHINE (“Secure Hybrid In Network caching Environment”) project. SHINE aims at efficiently extending terrestrial CDN services to satellite-en- abled scenarios, by designing innovative mech- anisms for the secure distribution of real-time multimedia information across hybrid channels, leveraging both unicast and multicast communi- cation paradigms. The original contribution of the paper is the analysis of satellite architectures and configurations tailored to efficiently support the SHINE solution, together with a high-level appli- cability assessment taking into account different satellite-enabled service models.