Space Computing Power Networks: A Survey

Abstract

Space Computing Power Networks (SCPNs), also termed as Satellite Comptuting Power Networks, as an integration of satellite networks, orbital computing, and terrestrial infrastructure, have been becoming an emerging architecture and attracting growing research attention during the past few years. Beyond meeting the differentiated intelligent communication, computing, and caching service requirements from users and terminals across space, air, ground, and sea, SCPNs hold significant importance for space exploration, earth observation, environment monitoring, remote user activities, and so on. There is no doubt that SCPNs will be the critical part of 6G to realize the ubiquitous and seamless intelligence. However, compared to traditional Terrestrial Computing Power Networks (TCPNs) and Satellite Computing Networks (SCNs), SCPNs holds the uniqueness, such as the cycled node movements, hierarchical network topology, extremely large network scalability, ubiquitous resource heterogeneity and constraints, and particular space computing environment. The system integration, protocol optimization, service orchestration, and sustainable operation of SCPN have inspired many meaningful research and projects. Considering existing survey papers mainly focus on scenarios of TCPNs carrying large-scale and complex computing tasks, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art research on SCPN, covering various aspects ranging from system architecture, applications and challenges, and diversified Quality of Service (QoS) metric analysis and optimization. Finally, a number of potential future research directions have also been discussed to enlighten more innovative works.