The past several decades have witnessed wide deployment of space information networks (SINs). More than 8000 satellites have been launched into Earth's orbit recently. Meanwhile, the space communications requirements have grown by a factor of 10 in the last decade. The sharply increasing traffic volume puts tremendous pressure on the network traffic control in SINs. Current end-host-based schemes have to collect a massive amount of data (e.g., explicit congestion notification) to respond to one network event (e.g., topology change, network congestion), which is unacceptable in SINs due to the large end-to-end delay. Recently, with the emergence of programmable network devices, it has become possible to perform flexible control strategies as the traffic is flowing through the network (i.e., in-network traffic control). By implementing the control directly inside the network, the in-network schemes are more effective at scale and more responsive to network dynamics. Therefore, in this article, we design an in-network traffic control powered SIN architecture to enhance the network performance. In addition, we present two use cases, in-network load balance and in-network congestion control, to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture. Extensive simulations are performed to evaluate our proposed schemes.

中文翻译：

---

在空间信息网络中使用可编程数据平面的可扩展流量控制


过去几十年见证了空间信息网络（SIN）的广泛部署。最近已有超过8000颗卫星发射进入地球轨道。与此同时，太空通信需求在过去十年中增长了 10 倍。急剧增长的流量给SIN网络流量控制带来巨大压力。当前基于终端主机的方案必须收集大量数据（例如，显式拥塞通知）来响应一个网络事件（例如，拓扑变化、网络拥塞），由于大量的端到端数据，这在 SIN 中是不可接受的。 -结束延迟。近年来，随着可编程网络设备的出现，使得在流量流经网络时执行灵活的控制策略（即网内流量控制）成为可能。通过直接在网络内部实施控制，网络内方案在规模上更加有效，并且对网络动态的响应更加灵敏。因此，在本文中，我们设计了一种基于网络内流量控制的 SIN 架构来增强网络性能。此外，我们还提出了两个用例，即网络内负载平衡和网络内拥塞控制，以证明我们架构的可行性。进行广泛的模拟来评估我们提出的方案。