Distributed Traffic Balancing Routing for LEO Satellite Networks

Satellite networks have been widely investigated both in the business and academia for many years, with many important routing algorithms reported in the literatures. However, fewer existing routing algorithms focus on the trade-off between the routing survivability and the routing computation and storage overheads. Due to topological dynamics, it is difficult to effectively apply the conventional routing protocols such as RIP or OSPF to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks. According to the virtual topology model based on virtual node, this paper propose a new fully distributed routing protocol for LEO satellite networks, called Distributed Traffic Balancing Routing (DTBR). The proposed protocol not only guarantees the routing survivability and provides the ability of traffic balancing, but also result in few additional computation and storage overheads only deriving from the information flooding of failed satellites. Simulation results demonstrate positive conclusions of our methods.