Software Defined Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Network: A Survey

SDN paradigm has successfully manage to pave the way toward next-generation networking, but the research on SDN-based integrated satellite and terrestrial network has just started. SDNenabled management and deployment architecture of integrated satelliteterrestrial network eases the complexity of management of infrastructures and networks, improves the maintaining and deployment costs, achieves efficient resource allocation and improves network performance of overall system. In this paper, we started introducing the SDN-based integrated satellite-terrestrial network architecture and discuss the unified and simple system functional architecture. Then we illustrate the two fundamental aspects of integrated network application functions. Following the demonstration of recent research works, we identify three challenges and discuss the emerging topics requiring further research.