Trustworthy and Load-Balancing Routing Scheme for Satellite Services with Multi-Agent DRL

Abstract

Massive computing tasks of various applications have been generated in 6G space-air-ground integrated networks, and need to be transmitted securely and reliably. Nevertheless, the mobility of satellites and the untrusted nodes bring new challenges to the routing scheme design in low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. To improve the system trust and elevate the service quality, this paper proposes a fully distributed trustworthy load-balancing routing scheme for satellite services with a multi-agent dueling double deep Q network (D3QN)-based learning algorithm. Our scheme organizes multiple agents to generate hop-by-hop routes and makes decisions based on the trust value of the nodes, which has good scalability to deploy on various satellite constellations and can meet the trust requirements of the services. Besides, we add a variable delay constraint into the load minimization objective to meet various delay-sensitive satellite quality of service (QoS) requirements. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme dramatically reduces the link queue utilization rate and enhances the system capability of handling delay-sensitive services. The packet loss rate of our scheme is 24% lower than that of the benchmark scheme when the system has 30% malicious nodes.