Integration of Low Earth Orbit Satellites with Terrestrial Cloud-edge Systems

With the rapid deployment of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, the integration of LEO satellites with terrestrial cloud-edge systems has attracted the attention from academia to provide ubiquitous services. This paper first reviews the existing terrestrial cloud-edge systems and the emerging LEO satellites in details. Furthermore, we propose the integration of orbital edge computing with terrestrial cloud-edge systems to utilize the computation and communication resources of both LEO satellites and terrestrial cloud-edge systems. To fully exploit the potential of LEO satellites, dealing with the challenges of orbital dynamics, intermittent connectivity and significantly constrained power capacities is of vital importance.