Komet: A Serverless Platform for Low-Earth Orbit Edge Services

TL;DR

Komet is a serverless platform designed for low-Earth orbit satellite networks, enabling elastic, low-latency edge computing services that adapt to satellite mobility and support global connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel serverless platform for LEO edge computing that manages resource allocation and service migration amid satellite mobility.

Findings

Komet enables high-availability edge services despite satellite movement.

Heuristics for service migration balance optimality and migration frequency.

Simulation results show effective trade-offs in service placement strategies.

Abstract

Low-Earth orbit satellite networks can provide global broadband Internet access using constellations of thousands of satellites. Integrating edge computing resources in such networks can enable global low-latency access to compute services, supporting end users in rural areas, remote industrial applications, or the IoT. To achieve this, resources must be carefully allocated to various services from multiple tenants. Moreover, applications must navigate the dynamic nature of satellite networks, where orbital mechanics necessitate frequent client hand-offs. Therefore, managing applications on the low-Earth orbit edge will require the right platform abstractions. We introduce Komet, a serverless platform for low-Earth orbit edge computing. Komet integrates Function-as-a-Service compute with data replication, enabling on-demand elastic edge resource allocation and frequent service migration against satellite orbital trajectories to keep services deployed in the same geographic region. We implement Komet as a proof-of-concept prototype and demonstrate how its abstractions can be used to build low-Earth orbit edge applications with high availability despite constant mobility. Further, we propose simple heuristics for service migration scheduling in different application scenarios and evaluate them in simulation based on our experiment traces, showing the trade-off between selecting an optimal satellite server at every instance and minimizing service migration frequency.