A Load-Balanced On-Demand Routing for LEO Satellite Networks

Due to population distribution and economic flourish diversity, the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite network carries unbalanced traffic load, which leads that parts of satellite links are congested while others are underutilized. Furthermore, the congested inter-satellite links result in high queuing delay and packet dropping ratio. To ensure an intelligent scheduling of traffic over entire satellite networks, a load-aware routing protocol named load-balanced on-demand routing (LBR) for LEO satellite networks is proposed in this paper. LBR integrates load judgment mechanism and location assistance strategy, which can reduce the time for path discovery and the control overhead. To evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, the simulation is conducted on the platform of NS-2. Simulation results verify that, comparing with the existing protocols, LBR can achieve better load balancing, lower end-to-end delay and packet dropping ratio, and higher network throughput with the acceptable