Distributed Satellite-Terrestrial Cooperative Routing Strategy Based on Minimum Hop-Count Analysis in Mega LEO Satellite Constellation

Mega low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation is promising in achieving global coverage with high capacity. However, forwarding packets in mega constellation faces long end-to-end delay caused by multi-hop routing and high-complexity routing table construction, which will detrimentally impair the network transmission efficiency. To overcome this issue, a distributed low-complexity satellite-terrestrial cooperative routing approach is proposed in this paper, and its core idea is that each node forwards packets to next-hop node under the constraints of minimum end-to-end hop-count and queuing delay. Particularly, to achieve an accurate and low-complexity minimum end-to-end hop-count estimation in satellite-terrestrial cooperative routing scenario, we first introduce a satellite real-time position based graph (RTPG) to simplify the description of three-dimensional constellation, and further abstract RTPG into a key node based graph (KNBG). Considering the frequent regeneration of KNBG due to satellite movement, a low complexity generation method of KNBG is studied as well. Finally, utilizing KNBG as input, we design the minimum end-to-end hop-count estimation method (KNBG-MHCE). Meanwhile, the computational complexity, routing path survival probability and practical implementation of our proposal are all deeply discussed. Extensive simulations are also conducted in systems with Ka and laser band inter-satellite links to verify the superiority of our proposal.