Analyzing Source-Routed Approaches for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Constellation Networks

Source-routing is a commonly applied routing solution to space-based communication networks. Despite its simplicity and flexibility, the approach has known disadvantages like the creation of hot spots and inefficient link load acquisition. However, the actual performance of source-routing depends significantly on its specific implementation and the reference system. For this reason, we analyze the performance of different source-routing schemes in a realistic scenario using a system-level simulator. Most importantly, we want to quantify the impact of using the inherent path diversity of constellation networks with inter-satellite links more effectively. To this end, we compare the QoS compliance between a shortest-path-first path selection based on latency and a random path selection from a set of minimum hop routes. Additionally, we investigate the impact of uniform and population-based user terminal distributions