YUHENG-OS: A Cloud-Native Space Cluster Operating System

2026-03-29

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of resource awareness and scheduling in cloud-native spaceborne clusters, where satellite mobility, resource heterogeneity, and fragmentation impede efficient task execution. To tackle these issues, the paper proposes a four-layer architecture tailored for space scenarios, along with three key techniques: modeling heterogeneous resource requirements of space tasks, fragment-aware resource sensing under network constraints, and multi-dimensional matching of heterogeneous resources to diverse tasks under temporal dependency constraints. By introducing a unified mechanism for abstracting, perceiving, and orchestrating heterogeneous resources, the framework enables large-scale, cross-satellite deployment of diverse workloads. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to terrestrial systems such as Kubernetes, the proposed approach improves task completion rates by up to 98% and reduces resource awareness latency by 71%.

Abstract

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%.

Problem

• cloud-native space clusters
• resource orchestration
• heterogeneous resources
• satellite mobility
• spaceborne computing

Innovation

• cloud-native space cluster
• heterogeneous resource orchestration
• satellite mobility
• resource awareness
• temporal dependency constraints