A research platform for software defined satellite networks

Software Defined Satellite Networking (SDSN) provides an innovative perspective to manage satellite network through logically centralized network view and standard interfaces between the control and data plane. Significant advantages of SDSN include enabling integration of space and terrestrial network, flexible and efficient resource management, rapid and economical network function updating, etc. However, at present, there is not an experiment platform specially for SDSN, restricting the in-depth study of SDSN. Therefore, in this paper, we propose OpenSatNet, a platform for software defined satellite networking research. OpenSatNet uses lightweight OS-level virtualization, including network namespaces and virtual network devices, can emulate a realistic satellite network and has a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). Through OpenSatNet, researchers can easily conduct a realistic experiment for SDSN on their PCs. The snapshot routing for SDSN is implemented to demonstrate the operation of our platform.