Dynamic Routing for Software-Defined LEO Satellite Networks based on ISL Attributes

The software-defined Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network can effectively improve the flexibility of the inter-satellite networking. However, the impact of Inter-Satellite Link (ISL) attributes on the network topology has not been well investigated in existed works, which leads to the loss of topology information and the unreliability of routing path. In this paper, we propose a dynamic routing algorithm based on ISL attributes to improve the adaptability and reliability of routing in LEO satellite network. Firstly, we construct the utility function of ISL attributes to quantify the link utility. Then, the maximum deviation algorithm is introduced to adaptively calculate the weight of attribute parameters in link utility function, which can quantify the impact of each attribute on link quality. Finally, the mathematical model of path utility is established, the routing path with highest path utility is selected as the optimal routing path. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the network performance by about 35%, 10% and 20% in terms of packet drop rate, end-to-end delay and throughput.