A combination of decreasing rocket payload costs and discovery of cutting-edge applications of satellites in low earth orbit has brought about a generation of “New Space” startups looking to cash-in on the opportunity. One such application is to provide low-latency internet to the most remote regions of the world. Companies have deployed thousands of, and are looking to deploy tens of thousands more, satellites to Low Earth Orbit. The low altitudes and wide expanse of these mega-constellations help keep latency to a minimum while providing internet coverage to regions that are inaccessible to terrestrial networks. However, the highly dynamic nature of these constellations presents the problem of internet packet routing, which is well addressed in conventional terrestrial networks. We show that the number of changes in topology from second to second can be in the order of a few hundreds and that each change takes 70–80 time slots to be reflected in forwarding tables of 90% of the network. As an alternative, we present a source routing solution coupled with a packet carried forwarding state that addresses all the above issues. We also provide a heuristic to computing network topology that can potentially speed up topology computation by 3×. Our experiments show that source routing is feasible with manageable overhead and is scalable to thousands of routing nodes.
Where is My Route? Enabling Source Routing in LEO Satellite Networks
2024-06-24
1238151 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Dynamic source routing algorithm for LEO satellite networks
British Library Online Contents | 2006
|