Analysis of Routing Techniques for Large-scale Constellations

The increasing number of nodes in satellite constellations poses challenges for routing design. Routing overhead in large-scale satellite constellations is higher compared to previous constellations, thus strategies to reduce routing overhead should be considered when designing routing algorithms. This paper investigates two strategies: the first one is the commonly used subdomain routing strategy, which involves dividing the LEO constellation into subdomains managed by GEO satellites. This enables a reduction in the size of the routing table and subsequently decreases the overhead of lookup. The second strategy is the A-Star algorithm, which is compared with the Dijkstra algorithm in the same scenario. The simulation results show that the A-Star algorithm can achieve the same performance as the Dijkstra algorithm.