Location and Design of Ground Stations for Software Defined Satellite Networks

In this paper, the problem of ground stations location in a global satellite communications network is formulated and a variable neighborhood search algorithm (VNS) for its solving is proposed. In this problem, it is required to place and configure the design of the ground stations, so as to maximize the number of delivered data packets, given a budget constraint and the set of sessions between the users or the users and the Internet. The overall amount of delivered packets for any tentative location and design of ground stations is estimated by means of approximate solving of the length-bounded fractional maximum multiproduct flow problem where all edges are of length one. Results of computational experiments and comparison of VNS with local search algorithms are provided.