Virtual Agent Clustering based Mobility Management over the Satellite Networks

Abstract

To overcome the bottleneck of the traditional mobility management, this paper proposes a virtual agent clustering based mobility management scheme for the lower-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite network. We collect the LEO satellites within the same location area into the virtual agent cluster (VAC), and define the region covered by the nodes in VAC as the virtual agent domain (VAD). Moreover, through information exchanging within the VAC, we construct the home mobile-agent-anchor (MAA) and the local MAA. In this way, the mobile node (MN) triggers the binding update to the home agent (HA) only if the home MAA is lost, and the MN’s switching within the VAD only need to update its intra-domain relations, which reduces the overhead of the mobility management and switching delay. Furthermore, the proposed scheme are theoretically evaluated in terms of the signaling overhead, handover latency and cache space. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to verify the efficacy of our scheme.