The QoS Guaranteed Routing Strategy in Low Earth Orbit Satellite Constellations

Abstract

The low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications play an important role in the sixth generation (6G) communications. How to achieve the quality of service (QoS) guaranteed traffic routing is always a research hotspot. However, due to the characteristics performed in the LEO satellite network, i.e., the four-link connection between the central satellite and its four adjacent satellites, connection switches caused by dynamic network topology, and different link rates between the same orbit and different orbits, the mainstream traffic routing methods will either cause the traffic congestion in the main stem, or the high computational complexity, which hinders their deployment and application in practice. To solve above problems, we propose a QoS guaranteed routing strategy, which assures the routing delay and link overhead of meeting engineering requirements. In this strategy, considering the above characteristics, we respectively propose the traffic priority division method, per hop QoS guaranteed technology and QoS guaranteed routing algorithm to guarantee differentiated traffic end-to-end QoS requirements. The simulation results show the superiority of our proposed method in terms of the lower delay, link cost, and computational complexity compared with existing literature.