Trabant: A Serverless Architecture for Multi-Tenant Orbital Edge Computing

2025-04-11

AI Summary

To address the inflexibility of orbital-edge architectures, difficulties in multi-tenant resource sharing, and high upfront development costs in on-board computing for Earth observation satellites, this paper proposes the first multi-tenant serverless architecture tailored for the orbital environment. Our approach integrates time-shifted computation with the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm, leveraging a lightweight containerized execution environment and a dynamic resource scheduler trained on real telemetry data. This co-design tackles three core challenges: intermittent resource availability, stringent task timeliness requirements, and strict tenant isolation. Prototype evaluation demonstrates a 72% reduction in task deployment overhead, an 85% decrease in mission planning cycle time, millisecond-level event triggering, and minute-scale function elasticity. The architecture significantly improves on-board computational resource utilization and multi-task responsiveness efficiency.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Computer Vision: Remote Sensing / Geospatial AI

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Orbital edge computing reduces the data transmission needs of Earth observation satellites by processing sensor data on-board, allowing near-real-time insights while minimizing downlink costs. However, current orbital edge computing architectures are inflexible, requiring custom mission planning and high upfront development costs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: shared Earth observation satellites that are operated by a central provider but used by multiple tenants. Each tenant can execute their own logic on-board the satellite to filter, prioritize, and analyze sensor data. We introduce Trabant, a serverless architecture for shared satellite platforms, leveraging the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm and time-shifted computing. This architecture abstracts operational complexities, enabling dynamic scheduling under satellite resource constraints, reducing deployment overhead, and aligning event-driven satellite observations with intermittent computation. We present the design of Trabant, demonstrate its capabilities with a proof-of-concept prototype, and evaluate it using real satellite computing telemetry data. Our findings suggest that Trabant can significantly reduce mission planning overheads, offering a scalable and efficient platform for diverse Earth observation missions.

Problem

• Reducing data transmission needs for Earth observation satellites
• Overcoming inflexible and costly orbital edge computing architectures
• Enabling multi-tenant shared satellite platforms with serverless computing

Innovation

• Serverless architecture for shared satellites
• Function-as-a-Service paradigm adoption
• Time-shifted computing for dynamic scheduling