Load-balancing routing algorithms for service congestion avoidance in LEO optical satellite networks

The low-Earth-orbit optical satellite network (LOSN) is an attractive solution to realize the end-to-end service quality of large-scale services, and it is the basis of establishing the 6G mobile network with high throughput and high reliability. However, the current LOSN is practically unable to achieve such high throughput for global service access. First, the centralized deployment of ground gateways will cause a heavy traffic load in the space segment of the LOSN, which becomes the bottleneck constraining the further growth of network throughput. Second, the high-speed movement of LEO satellites will cause continuous movement of traffic load, which will affect the scalability of routing computing. In this paper, two routing algorithms are proposed to increase the throughput in the dynamic LOSN topology. The congestion-aware load balancing (CALB) algorithm is proposed to address the inter-satellite link congestion in the dynamic LOSN topology. Then, a load-balancing routing algorithm based on satellite-ground cooperation (SGC-LB) is proposed to further reduce the impact of the network bottleneck. To evaluate the performance of the proposed routing algorithm, extensive simulations were performed on a 288-satellite Walker-Star constellation with inter-satellite links. The service blockage rate and network bandwidth utilization rate are evaluated showing the effectiveness of the proposed routing algorithm. The network using the SGC-LB algorithm can accommodate 60.00%, 56.00%, 42.22%, and 33.33% more services than using the Shortest Path algorithm, Sway algorithm, CALB algorithm, and Anycast algorithm, respectively, with zero service congestion during the simulation. The SGC-LB also gains a 6.04%, 5.00%, 5.04%, and 0.77% higher network utilization rate than the Shortest Path, Sway, CALB, and Anycast algorithms, respectively.(c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group