Genetically Inspired Contact Plan Design in Small Satellite Networks

Aiming at scheduling links efficiently, Contact Plan Design (CPD) has been playing an increasingly prominent role in the resource-limited Small Satellite Networks (SSNs). In CPD, the transfer stages of bundles should be coordinated arrange. Neglecting such feature in the bundle transmission undoubtedly deteriorate the network performance. For this issue, an algorithm named Genetically Inspired Contact Plan (GICP) is proposed by jointly considering the features of Contact Plans (CPs) and Genetic Approaches (GAs). The first main step in the proposed scheme is encoding, which represents CPs as strings of binary values that easy to process. Then, the strings are repaired and evaluated that satisfy the requirements. Finally, a genetically inspired operation that simulate the biological competition is introduced to obtain CPs with lower delivery time. The simulation results show that GICP can outperform the traditional GAs in terms of delivery time and target fitness.