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

The current shift toward the virtualization of network infrastructure components enables a dynamic 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 capabilities. 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 pursued 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-enabled scenarios, by designing innovative mechanisms for the secure distribution of real-time multimedia information across hybrid channels, leveraging both unicast and multicast communication 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 applicability assessment taking into account different satellite-enabled service models.