Processing-While-Transmitting: Cost-Minimized Transmission in SDN-Based STINs

Existing Space-Terrestrial Integrated Network (STIN) applications collect all data from multiple satellites and terrestrial nodes to the specific analyze center on the earth for processing, which wastes lots of network resources. To save these resources, we propose a novel processing-while-transmitting pattern in the SDN-based STIN architecture. Through a logically centralized control plane, it cooperatively processes a complex task on appropriate nodes during data transmission. Here, the key point is to jointly determine the transmission path and place subtasks adaptive to data distributions, heterogeneous link costs, task characteristics, the dynamic topology, and network resources. In this paper, we firstly formulate the Transmission-cost-minimized joint Routing and Tasks placement Problem (TRTP) in time-varying STINs. We prove it is NP-hard and has no Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS). To solve the problem, we propose the Joint Routing and Task Placement (JRTP) algorithm. It first converts the time-varying STIN to a stable graph to cope with the network dynamics, according to the topology and resources during task processing. Then, it jointly decides the routing and task placement through a task-topology graph model, which converts the TRTP problem on the stable graph to the classic shortest path problem. We prove that the performance of JRTP is bounded in cases when transmission resources are sufficient and further improve it through the idea of reinforcement. The experimental results show that our processing pattern can significantly decrease the transmission cost and delay, and our algorithms outperform most related ones.