Satellite

Routing (electronic design automation)

Engineering

Satellite constellation

Ecology

Network topology

Aerospace engineering

Biology

Static routing

Computer science

Distributed computing

Adaptability

Computer network

Routing protocol

Link-state routing protocol

Multipath routing

Equal-cost multi-path routing

Routing table

Topology (electrical circuits)

Electrical engineering

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

With the characteristics of low-latency, seamless coverage and high bandwidth, the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network has been the promising technology for the sixth-generation mobile communication (6 G) networks, especially, the inter-satellite link can improve the flexibility of inter-satellite networking and routing. However, in the existing works, since the impact of link attributes on the satellite topology has not been well investigated, it is difficult to avoid the loss of topology information for the transmission path selection, which may aggravate the unreliability of routing path. In this paper, we propose a novel time-varying topology model for the LEO satellite network, to improve the adaptability of the satellite routing. Firstly, the weighted time-space evolution graph based on the link attributes is established to construct the time-varying topology model of LEO satellite networks. Then, the utility function of the link attributes is modelled and the multi-attribute decision-making is introduced to calculate the weight of each link attribute for the quantification of the link utility. Finally, based on the topology model, the inter-satellite link utility-based dynamic routing algorithm is proposed to improve the adaptability of satellite routing. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed routing algorithm outperforms the existing routing algorithms in terms of packet drop rate, end-to-end delay and throughput.

Time-Varying Topology Model for Dynamic Routing in LEO Satellite Constellation Networks