Fault-tolerant routing for satellite command and control

New satellite systems, such as transformational communications (TC) and space based infrared systems (SBIRS), strive to support higher bandwidth, greater connectivity, and growing capabilities. In This work we propose and evaluate a fault-tolerant routing scheme designed for such systems with integrated ground and satellite networks. This routing scheme uses a number of previously computed routes to rapidly respond to node and link failures. Multiple routes are pre-computed for various fault scenarios; these routes are stored in each satellite. To evaluate this scheme, we measure the effectiveness with which it responds to failures using simulation. We evaluated the performance of our fault-tolerant routing scheme using extensive simulation and considering several types of satellite faults. We employed a simulation integrating the satellite modeling capabilities of the Satellite Orbit Analysis Program (SOAP) with network modeling capabilities of Network Simulator version two (ns-2). A tool internal to The Aerospace Corporation, SOAP provides highly accurate models for satellite ephemeris propagation in this case used by ns-2 for the purpose of determining satellite positions. Our results show that the impact on the delay performance is negligible with single or multiple link failures; with satellite failures, although the maximum delay increases by 30%, the average delay remains the same.