Opportunistic Content-Aware Routing in Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

As a promising complement to terrestrial cellular networks, satellite networks have recently drawn increasing attention, offering seamless coverage cost-effectively. However, with the rapidly increasing users’ demand for multimedia content, how to achieve efficient content transmission seamlessly becomes a critical but knotty problem. To provide an efficient solution from the routing perspective, in this paper, we propose an opportunistic content-aware routing scheme. Our scheme combines the features of in-network caching and content awareness of information-centric networking (ICN) architecture. The basic idea of the proposed scheme is to sense users’ requests and find the optimal route solution with the largest potential gain. Moreover, considering the limitation of real-time signaling collection in satellite networks, we design a cached content prediction method. The method is capable of inferring the probability of content being cached based on historical popularity information, providing essential information for measuring potential gains. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed opportunistic content-aware routing scheme outperforms baseline approaches with significantly reduced delay and traffic consumption.