CRO-SS: A Route Oscillation Suppression Scheme for IP-Based Satellite Network

Abstract

With the increasing demand for Internet access in rural, remote, and other areas, using the IP-based satellite network has become a trend to provide global Internet services. An important aspect of building this network is to achieve efficient routing. However, when we conducted a systematic analysis of the routing efficiency of such a network, we found a severe route oscillation problem in the cross region of satellite orbits. This problem occurs every 67.4 seconds and causes 8.3% ~ 24.1% of end-to-end paths in the entire network to flap, thus seriously damaging the routing efficiency and network performance. We term this the cross route oscillation (CRO) problem and found that it is primarily caused by the conflict between the path length and path lifetime. Subsequently, we propose the cross route oscillation suppression scheme (CRO-SS) to suppress CRO by decoupling that conflict. The extensive experiments using real-world data indicate that CRO-SS can significantly improve routing stability and network performance. The occurrence frequency of route flapping, the total number of changed paths, and the total number of affected satellite nodes over a system period are approximately 24.7%, 58.5%, and 63.1%, respectively. Meanwhile, the throughput is increased by 20% and the packet loss rate is decreased by 72.4% ~ 97.8%.