A Multicast Routing Algorithm for Datagram Service in Delta LEO Satellite Constellation Networks

Abstract

Satellites can broadcast datagram over wide areas, therefore, the satellite network has congenital advantages to implement multicast service. LEO satellite has the property of efficient bandwidth usage, lower propagation delay and lower power consumption in the user terminals and satellites. Therefore, the constellation network composed by LEO satellites is an essential part of future satellite communication networks. In this paper, we propose a virtual center based multicast (VCMulticast) routing algorithm for LEO satellite constellation network. The algorithm uses the geographic center information of group users to route multicast datagrams, with less memory, computer power and signaling overhead. We evaluate the delay and performance of our algorithm by means of simulations in the OPENET simulator. The results indicate that the delay of the proposed multicast method exceeds the minimum propagation by at most 29.1% on the average, which is a quite acceptable achievement, considering the resource overhead reduction that can be introduced by our proposal