Traffic-aware Link Assignment in GEO Satellite Communication Networks

Abstract

Due to the advantages of global coverage, large capacity and support for remote area and emergency communication, satellite communications have played an important role in civil and military fields. To improve communication system performance, constructing satellite networks through inter-satellite link (ISL) is an important method. As the number of ISLs of a satellite is limited, reasonable link assignment is critical to achieve good performance. Most of existing related works adopt a simplified theoretical network model. In this paper, we construct a more realistic satellite Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) network model which takes the visibility of satellites, number of antennas and their pointing range into consideration. Besides, we formulate a traffic-aware link assignment problem based on the model and propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm takes less time to transmit traffic than usual fixed link assignment patterns. Moreover, by changing the weights different services, we can adjust their transmission time.