Link Attributes Based Multi-service Routing for Software-Defined Satellite Networks

Satellite networks are the potential complementary of terrestrial networks, which are expected to provide full-coverage and broadband access anywhere, anytime. As satellite networks scale up, Software-Defined Satellite Network (SDSN) is a promising paradigm due to its higher flexibility in network management. However, in the SDSN with highly time-varying characteristics, the traditional terrestrial routing strategy can hardly meet the QoS requirements for diverse services. In this paper, we propose a Link-Attributes-based multi-service On-Demand Routing (LAODR) algorithm under SDSN architecture. It quantifies the reliability of the Inter-Satellite Links (ISL) and provides a fine-grained state description of the dynamic topology. Furthermore, we select the K-shortest path as the solution space and reasonably allocate link resources based on LAODR to meet the diverse service demands of users. We implement LAODR and conduct experiments by using real network topologies. The results validate that LAODR not only satisfies the QoS requirements of different types of services but also outperforms other routing algorithms in terms of mean end-to-end latency, packet loss ratio, throughput and node congestion degree.