@inproceedings{bpf-prime:hotnets25,
    author = {Wang, Haoda and Pendergrast, Robert Leo and Bj\"{o}rnsson, Krist\'{o}fer Fannar and Somaia, Anika and Landa, Ezra and Yang, Junfeng and Cidon, Asaf},
    title = "Above the Clouds: New Software Challenges in Space Computing",
    year = "2025",
    abstract = {Satellite-backed services have become an essential component of everyday life, in areas such as navigation, Internet connectivity and imaging. The collapsing cost of launching to space has disrupted the way satellites are deployed, shifting the industry from a model of few expensive fault-tolerant high-orbit satellites to arrays of commodity low-cost SmallSats in low-Earth orbit. However, satellite software hasn't kept up with the hardware trends, and missions are still using the ad-hoc flight software infrastructure built for expensive one-off missions in high-altitude orbits, wherein operators manually deploy software to each satellite individually. This approach is woefully inadequate in the new emerging SmallSat operational model, where an operator needs to manage hundreds of "wimpy" satellites with varying hardware capabilities under intermittent communication. Furthermore, SmallSat operators increasingly "rent out" their infrastructure to third parties, and need to support the workloads of multiple different tenants on the same satellites, which raises the classic problems of isolation and security similar to cloud computing, but in the much more constrained hardware environment of space. In this paper, we describe the new research questions introduced by this operational model. We also sketch the design of a novel lightweight eBPF-based runtime for fleets of multi-tenant, heterogeneous and intermittently-connected satellites.},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 24th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets)",
    pages = "393–401",
    numpages = "9",
    doi = "10.1145/3772356.3772396",
    pdfurl = "https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3772356.3772396",
    keywords = "satellite computing, flight software, bytecode languages",
    location = "UMD Campus, College Park, MD, USA",
    series = "HotNets '25"
}