Autonomous Routing for LEO Satellite Constellations with Minimum Use of Inter-Plane Links

A Low Earth Orbit (LEO) mega constellation (MC) is a satellite network of hundreds of spacecrafts organized in several orbital planes, which can be deployed at different inclinations and altitudes. Beyond the connection to the ground segment, the direct inter-satellite communication, both intra-plane and inter-plane, is also used. One of the challenges in LEO MCs is the development of efficient routing strategies that scale up with the size of the network. We propose a simple distributed routing algorithm, GomHop, to find the best next-hop for forwarding a packet in a connection-less network. Each satellite runs the on-board algorithm autonomously, with no need for the ground segment to calculate, maintain and distribute routing tables. GomHop minimizes the number of required inter-plane hops, which are typically more challenging and expensive for the network, and relies mostly on intra-plane hops. The simulation results show that the overall performance is very close to the centralized optimal solution provided by the Dijkstra algorithm, with GomHop having a smaller amount of inter-plane hops and low complexity, in contrast to the O(N²) of Dijkstra.