Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites play a pivotal role in global connectivity-delivering high-speed Internet, cellular coverage, and massive IoT support. With ever-growing onboard computing and storage resources, LEO satellites herald a new cloud paradigm: space cloud computing. While container or chestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes) excel in terrestrial data centers, they are ill-suited to LEO satellite networks, featuring geographic dispersion and frequent handovers. Those features bring high latency and intermittent management, leading to control plane failure in container orchestration. To address this, we propose KubeSpace, a low-latency and stable control plane specifically designed for container orchestration on LEO satellites. KubeSpace combines two key innovations: a distributed ground-control-node architecture that binds each satellite to its nearest controller for uninterrupted management, and an orbit-aware placement with dynamic assignment strategy that further minimizes communication latency and handover frequency. Extensive experiments based on real satellite traces demonstrate that compared to existing solutions, KubeSpace reduces the average management latency of satellite nodes by 59% without any management interruption time.

翻译：低地球轨道（LEO）卫星在全球连接中发挥着关键作用——提供高速互联网、蜂窝覆盖和海量物联网支持。随着星载计算和存储资源的不断增长，低轨卫星预示了一种新的云范式：空间云计算。尽管容器编排平台（如Kubernetes）在地面数据中心表现出色，但它们并不适合具有地理分散性和频繁切换特性的低轨卫星网络。这些特性带来了高延迟和间歇性管理问题，导致容器编排中的控制平面失效。为解决这一问题，我们提出了KubeSpace，这是一个专为低轨卫星容器编排设计的低延迟稳定控制平面。KubeSpace融合了两项关键创新：一是分布式地面控制节点架构，将每颗卫星绑定至其最近控制器以实现不间断管理；二是结合动态分配策略的轨道感知放置机制，进一步最小化通信延迟与切换频率。基于真实卫星轨迹的大量实验表明，与现有解决方案相比，KubeSpace在实现零管理中断时间的同时，将卫星节点的平均管理延迟降低了59%。