Distributed contact plan design for multi-layer satellite-terrestrial network

In multi-layer satellite-terrestrial network, Contact Graph Routing (CGR) uses the contact information among satellites to compute routes. However, due to the resource constraints in satellites, it is extravagant to configure lots of the potential contacts into contact plans. What's more, a huge contact plan makes the computing more complex, which further increases computing time. As a result, how to design an efficient contact plan becomes crucial for multi-layer satellite network, which usually has a large scaled topology. In this paper, we propose a distributed contact plan design scheme for multi-layer satellite network by dividing a large contact plan into several partial parts. Meanwhile, a duration based inter-layer contact selection algorithm is proposed to handle contacts disruption problem. The performance of the proposed design was evaluated on our Identifier/Locator split based satellite-terrestrial network testbed with 79 simulation nodes. Experiments showed that the proposed design is able to reduce the data delivery delay.