Time division inter‐satellite link topology generation problem: Modeling and solution

Summary In this paper, we study the time-division inter-satellite link topology generation (TDILTG) problem for the well-known Chinese BeiDou Global Navigation Satellite System. The TDILTG problem consists in generating a time-division topology of the inter-satellite link network for the navigation satellite system to spread systematic data to all satellites via a few source satellites with the purpose of minimizing the time required to spread the data. We propose a mathematical model to formulate the TDILTG problem and study its 2 lower bounds through a thorough analysis of the problem characteristics. We also present a deterministic constructive (DC) algorithm to solve this problem approximately but very quickly, with a time complexity of O(n3), where n is the number of satellites. Extensive experimental studies on a wide range of randomly generated instances show that the proposed DC algorithm is able to obtain the optimal solutions for most tested instances in less than 1 second. Meanwhile, we also validate that the DC algorithm performs well when the problem scale is large. Furthermore, we provide insights of the effects of different instance parameters on the final results.