Location-aware load balancing routing protocol for LEO satellite networks

As the satellites are limited by the deficient hardware resources and the difficulty of hardware upgrading. A location-aware load balancing routing is an effective way to prolong the lifetime of satellites by decreasing the charging and discharging rate in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite battery during the eclipse period. The proposed algorithm direct the traffic load to solar-period satellites to avoid using battery-eclipse satellites as relay. By tuning some tunable coefficient, this algorithm can provide a trade-off between the operational lifetime of the satellite networks and the propagation delay of the selected routes. A better distribution of traffic among satellites can be guaranteed as well. The proposed scheme is dubbed: Location-Aware Load Balancing (LABRA) scheme. Through simulations on Iridium-like constellation, the proposed scheme is shown to achieve better load balancing, and can especially increase the battery lifetime, guarantee better throughput and lower packet loss. Furthermore, results from the implementation complexity analysis demonstrate that with the aid of space orbit parameters, LABRA has lower on-board computation, storage and zero exchange signaling between satellites than other on-board routing schemes.