Economic Routing for Immersive Media in Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Network

Satellite-terrestrial integrated network (STIN) possesses the advantage of offering ubiquitous coverage, thereby enabling people to access service freely even in remote areas. There is a growing market for immersive media (IM), and delivering high-quality IM services via stable routes has become a highly active research area. However, existing routing approaches primarily focus on optimizing network performance, the tailored routing strategies for IM services are scarce in the literature. In this paper, we propose an economic routing (EcoR) method for IM services in STIN. Specifically, for the scenario where IM service requests are highly concentrated, utilizing the cost balance method to lighten the burden of maintaining heavy flows on satellite networks. We formulate an optimization problem that aims to direct the traffic to less congested links while ensuring an IM service guarantee and achieving a cost balance for the network. To this end, we propose an advanced Dijkstra algorithm that combines the deep forest searching method and the traditional Dijkstra algorithm to identify all potential routing paths. Additionally, we adopt a greedy approach to select the most appropriate routing path that minimizes the cost. Evaluation results show that the proposed EcoR algorithm achieves cost savings of 32% and a service success rate increase of 64% when compared to other routing methods.