Quick Routing Response to Link Failure in Low-Earth Orbit Satellite Networks

Low earth orbit satellite communication systems are attractive for provisioning global, high-speed and low latency Internet access services. In order to achieve global continuous multiple coverage, the number of satellites is tremendous. But Low earth orbit satellite networks are prone to instability due to unpredictable link failures and frequent topology changes. Therefore, in this paper, a novel routing schemes with quick response to link failures is first proposed. Based on Dijkstra algorithm, a scalable routing algorithm is proposed to minimize the end-to-end transmission delay. It takes advantage of the predictable constellation trajectory, and changes dynamically according to the changes of network topology. It provides the shortest routing path and an alternative path simultaneously. When a link failure is detected by one satellite, notification packets will be sent to its neighbors for adjustment to the alternative routing path. Notification packets also will be sent to the head node for the recalculation of routing table. Finally, extensive simulations have been conducted, and the results show that the proposed scheme is able to produce desired performance.