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New scenarios and use cases are raising following the birth of the fifth generation of mobile communications. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the main use cases which are growing, leading to a massive amount of data that need to be exchanged throughout the Internet. Satellite communication networks are essential in remote and isolated environments and can support fully connected environments by offloading the terrestrial infrastructure concerning delay–tolerant traffic flows. However, satellite network resources are limited and expensive, so they need to be carefully used in order to avoid waste and satisfy the required user performance. The multi-access edge computing (MEC) concept can be exploited in this context to allow data preprocessing at the edge, i.e., close to the users, so reducing the amount of data that has to traverse the backhaul satellite link and, in some cases, reducing data delivery times. This article analyses the performance of a satellite architecture in the IoT framework highlighting the advantages brought by MEC, also including data aggregation and compression techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of network softwarization and virtualization technology in the field of telecommunications has opened the door to a radical review of the applications, protocols, and deployment models. In this evolving framework, old assumptions and constraints specific to satellite communications must be carefully re-assessed. To this aim, we revisit the role of the performance enhancing proxy (PEP), replaced by a chain of custom virtual network functions properly enabled to optimize common web traffic performance over a backhaul dynamically enabled with a supplementary satellite link. The resulting virtual PEP (vPEP) is compliant with the breakthrough virtualization and slicing paradigms and can fruitfully exploit the advanced features of the most recent IETF technologies such as QUIC and MPTCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]