YUHENG-OS: A Cloud-Native Space Cluster Operating System

TL;DR

YUHENG-OS is a specialized cloud-native operating system designed for space clusters, effectively managing heterogeneous onboard resources and significantly improving task completion rates compared to terrestrial systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel space-specific OS architecture with key technologies for resource modeling, awareness, and task-resource matching under space constraints.

Findings

Achieves up to 98% higher task completion ratio.

Reduces resource awareness delay by 71%.

Supports large-scale, diverse space applications.

Abstract

As industry and academia continue to advance spaceborne computing and communication capabilities, the formation of cloud-native space clusters (CNSCs) has become an increasingly evident trend. This evolution progressively exposes the resource management challenges associated with coordinating fragmented and heterogeneous onboard resources while supporting large-scale and diverse space applications. However, directly transplanting mature terrestrial cloud-native cluster operating system paradigms into space is ineffective due to the fragmentation of spaceborne computing resources and satellite mobility, which collectively impose substantial challenges on resource awareness and orchestration. This article presents YUHENG-OS, a cloud-native space cluster operating system tailored for CNSCs. YUHENG-OS provides unified abstraction, awareness, and orchestration of heterogeneous spaceborne infrastructure, enabling cluster-wide task deployment and scheduling across distributed satellites. We introduce a four-layer system architecture and three key enabling technologies: modeling of heterogeneous resource demands for space tasks, fragmented heterogeneous resource awareness under network constraints, and matching of differentiated tasks with multidimensional heterogeneous resources under temporal dependency constraints. Evaluation results show that, compared with representative terrestrial cloud-native cluster operating systems exemplified by Kubernetes, YUHENG-OS achieves a substantially higher task completion ratio, with improvements of up to 98%. This advantage is primarily attributed to its ability to reduce resource awareness delay by 71%.