Satellite mobility pattern scheme for centrical and seamless handover management in LEO satellite networks

Abstract

Since low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have important advantages over geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO) systems such as low propagation delay, low power requirements, and more efficient spectrum allocation due to frequency reuse between satellites and spotbeams, they are considered to be used to complement the existing terrestrial fixed and wireless networks in the evolving global mobile network. However, one of the major problems with LEO satellites is their higher speed relative to the terrestrial mobile terminals, which move at lower speeds but at more random directions. Therefore, handover management in LEO satellite networks becomes a very challenging task for supporting global mobile communication. Efficient and accurate methods are needed for LEO satellite handovers between the moving footprints. In this paper, we propose a new seamless handover management scheme for LEO satellites (SeaHO-LEO), which utilizes the handover management schemes aiming at decreasing latency, data loss, and handover blocking probability. We also present another interesting handover management model called satellite mobility pattern based handover management in LEO satellites (PatHO-LEO) which takes mobility pattern of both satellites and mobile terminals into account to minimize the handover messaging traffic. This is achieved by the newly introduced billboard manager which is used for location updates of mobile users and satellites. The billboard manager makes the proposed handover model much more flexible and easier than the current solutions, since it is a central server and supports the management of the whole system. To show the performance of the proposed algorithms, we run an extensive set of simulations both for the proposed algorithms and well known handover management methods as a baseline model. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are very promising for seamless handover in LEO satellites.