Research And Simulation Of Low Earth Orbit Satellite Constellation Routing

Satellites communication networks have special functions and effects in areas like communication navigation, resource exploration, environment and disaster monitoring and so on, and can be used as the supplement and disaster recovery communicating methods of terrestrial networks. LEO satellites have many feathers such as low end-to-end delay, short development cycle, up-to-date technology and low cost and so on, and can be organized into LEO constellation networks to accomplish space missions.Routing issues are fundamental matters in space networks, and have great significance for improving timeliness and reliability of data transferring. LEO constellation networks have the characteristics of dynamic topology, limited storage and computing ability, long inter-satellite link delay, unbalanced data flows and so on, and these make their routing technology facing new challenges.This topic takes AODV routing protocol as reference, according to LEO constellation networks'characteristics, and proposes a multi-path flow balanced on-demand routing (MBR) protocol. The main work of this paper is as follows.First, according to LEO constellation networks'characteristics, the key technologies of path finding and routing in LEO constellation networks are found out, which are adaptive routing, multi-path and load balance.According to the Shortcomings of existing protocols, such as lacking of adaptability and little concern with unbalanced demand, MBR protocol introduces multi-path method and load balance method based on multi-path,and then proves the independence of the paths obtained by the multi-path method.Then the paper designs the MBR protocol in detail, deploys the network topography, constructs the satellite node model, and implements the process model of the MBR protocol.Finally, the paper builds a targeted simulation environment in OPNET, in order to verify the MBR protocol. The simulation results show that MBR protocol can reduce route errors and improve packet delivery rate both in idea situation and with node failures, and it can run within LEO constellation networks efficiently.