  As the increase in satellite number and variety, satellite ground stations
should be required to offer user services in a flexible and efficient manner.
Network function virtualization (NFV) can provide a new paradigm to allocate
network resources on-demand for user services over the underlying network.
However, most of the existing work focuses on the virtual network function
(VNF) placement and routing traffic problem for enterprise data center
networks, the issue needs to further study in satellite communication
scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the VNF placement and routing traffic
problem in satellite ground station networks. We formulate the problem of
resource allocation as an integer nonlinear programming (INLP) model and the
objective is to minimize the link resource utilization and the number of
servers used. Considering the information about satellite orbit fixation and
mission planning, we propose location-aware resource allocation (LARA)
algorithms based on Greedy and IBM CPLEX 12.10, respectively. The proposed LARA
algorithm can assist in deploying VNFs and routing traffic flows by predicting
the running conditions of user services. We evaluate the performance of our
proposed LARA algorithm in three networks of Fat-Tree, BCube, and VL2.
Simulation results show that our proposed LARA algorithm performs better than
that without prediction, and can effectively decrease the average resource
utilization of satellite ground station networks.

Networking and Internet Architecture;Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing