Application of Contact Graph Routing in Satellite Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract

Satellite networks have many inherent advantages over terrestrial networks and have become an important part of the global network infrastructure. Routing aimed at satellite networks has become a hot and challenging research topic. Satellite networks, which are special kind of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN), can also adopt the routing solutions of DTN. Among the many routing proposals, Contact Graph Routing (CGR) is an excellent candidate, since it is designed particularly for use in highly deterministic space networks. The applicability of CGR in satellite networks is evaluated by utilizing the space oriented DTN gateway model based on OPNET(Optimized Network Engineering Tool). Link failures are solved with neighbor discovery mechanism and route recomputation. Earth observation scenario is used in the simulations to investigate CGR’s performance. The results show that the CGR performances are better in terms of effectively utilizing satellite networks resources to calculate continuous route path and alternative route can be successfully calculated under link failures by utilizing fault tolerance scheme.