Dynamic discovery of ground stations in Ring Road networks

The Ring Road approach describes a world-wide message-ferry network rendering communication between ground stations via Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites possible. In this context, delay-tolerant networking (DTN) protocols are a native fit for data transfer. Unfortunately, the state of the art in the DTN domain is incomplete to fulfill this role. A Ring Road deployment would for example heavily benefit from an approach to dynamically integrate ground stations into the overall network. In this paper, we present a novel concept applicable on LEO satellites to dynamically discover ground stations and predict future contacts to them. The approach does not only enable dynamic integration of constantly active ground stations, but as well of intermittently available ones. The predicted contacts are intended to be leveraged by a DTN routing algorithm, e.g. a modified variant of Contact Graph Routing (CGR). The approach has been designed for low-cost LEO satellites with low hardware resources such as CubeSats. Finally, focusing upon microcontroller-based execution environments, we have intensively evaluated our results within realistic test cases based on an existing DTN protocol implementation.