A Timeslot Division Strategy for Availability in Integrated Satellite and Terrestrial Network

With the rapid evolution of space communication technologies, satellite networks have entered a booming period. In recent years, Integrated Satellite and Terrestrial Network (ISTN) has been recognized as the trend of future networks. In order to adapt the existing routing technology to the network with high dynamic characteristics, a large number of research have tried to divide the timeslot in the satellite network and regard the network as static in a timeslot. However, The existing methods do not consider the existence of network convergence process in ISTN. With the massive increase in satellite handoff and the consensus of running distributed routing protocol, the network availability drops sharply in the timeslot divided by the existing methods. This paper proposes Handoff Synchronization to reduce the long convergence time. Moreover, STARSLOT is proposed to divide timeslots and improve the ISTN’s availability. Extensive simulation show that for the typical ISTN architecture, STARSLOT can improve the network availability by 52.63% as compared to other existing methods. Moreover, STARSLOT is much less affected by the increase in network scale.