YUHENG-OS: A Cloud-Native Space Cluster Operating System
This addresses resource management challenges for space applications, enabling more efficient coordination across distributed satellites, though it is incremental as it adapts existing cloud-native paradigms to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of managing fragmented and heterogeneous resources in cloud-native space clusters by introducing YUHENG-OS, a tailored operating system that achieves up to 98% higher task completion ratio compared to terrestrial systems like Kubernetes, primarily by reducing resource awareness delay by 71%.
As industry and academia continue to advance spaceborne computing and communication capabilities, the formation of cloud-native space clusters (CNSCs) has become an increasingly evident trend. This evolution progressively exposes the resource management challenges associated with coordinating fragmented and heterogeneous onboard resources while supporting large-scale and diverse space applications. However, directly transplanting mature terrestrial cloud-native cluster operating system paradigms into space is ineffective due to the fragmentation of spaceborne computing resources and satellite mobility, which collectively impose substantial challenges on resource awareness and orchestration. This article presents YUHENG-OS, a cloud-native space cluster operating system tailored for CNSCs. YUHENG-OS provides unified abstraction, awareness, and orchestration of heterogeneous spaceborne infrastructure, enabling cluster-wide task deployment and scheduling across distributed satellites. We introduce a four-layer system architecture and three key enabling technologies: modeling of heterogeneous resource demands for space tasks, fragmented heterogeneous resource awareness under network constraints, and matching of differentiated tasks with multidimensional heterogeneous resources under temporal dependency constraints. Evaluation results show that, compared with representative terrestrial cloud-native cluster operating systems exemplified by Kubernetes, YUHENG-OS achieves a substantially higher task completion ratio, with improvements of up to 98%. This advantage is primarily attributed to its ability to reduce resource awareness delay by 71%.