Provision of traffic grooming for distributed satellite cluster networks

Abstract

SummaryDistributed satellite cluster (DSC), which is usually used to construct backbone networks for space information networks, can be viewed as a single satellite carrying more payload with stronger ability. To implement traffic grooming in satellite optical backbone networks, the severe rate mismatch between wavelength and a single connection request must be considered due to the scarce characteristic of on‐board wavelength resources. In this paper, we adopt a typical DSC architecture in which the process of traffic grooming can be successfully partitioned into two independent parts, including intracluster traffic grooming and ring traffic grooming. For intracluster traffic grooming, we propose a multimode grooming method and design an improved ant colony algorithm (ACO) to obtain the optimum solutions. Simulation results show that the improved ACO yields better convergence performance than traditional ACO; in addition, the improved ACO has potentials in decreasing the number of wavelengths to be used. For ring traffic grooming, we develop a grooming circle (GC) construction algorithm based on bidirectional graph node partition. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms greedy algorithm not only in the construction of full GCs but also in improving wavelength utilization efficiency.