Towards SDN/NFV-enabled satellite ground segment systems: bandwidth on demand use case

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Key features of satellite communications such as wide-scale coverage, broadcast/multicast support and high availability, together with significant amounts of new satellite capacity coming online, anticipate new opportunities for satellite communications services as an integral part within upcoming 5G systems. To materialize these opportunities, satellite communications services have to be provisioned and operated in a more flexible, agile and cost-effective manner than done today. In this context, this paper describes the architecture of a satellite ground segment system that is built on the introduction of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies and examines the use case for delivering a Satellite Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) solution.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft