Multi-Network-Region Traffic Cooperative Scheduling in Large-Scale LEO Satellite Networks

A low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite network can provide full-coverage access services worldwide and is an essential candidate for future 6G networking. However, the large variability of the geographic distribution of the Earth's population leads to an uneven service volume distribution of access service. Moreover, the limitations on the resources of satellites are far from being able to serve the traffic in hotspot areas. To enhance the forwarding capability of satellite networks, we first assess how hotspot areas under different load cases and spatial scales significantly affect the network throughput of an LEO satellite network overall. Then, we propose a multi-region cooperative traffic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm migrates low-grade traffic from hotspot areas to coldspot areas for forwarding, significantly increasing the overall throughput of the satellite network while sacrificing some latency of end-to-end forwarding. This algorithm can utilize all the global satellite resources and improve the utilization of network resources. We model the cooperative multi-region scheduling of large-scale LEO satellites. Based on the model, we build a system testbed using OMNET++ to compare the proposed method with existing techniques. The simulations show that our proposed method can reduce the packet loss probability by 30% and improve the resource utilization ratio by 3.69%.