The technology advancement of satellite instruments requires increasingly fast interconnection technologies, for which no standardised solution exists. SpaceFibre is the forthcoming protocol promising to overcome the limitation of its predecessor SpaceWire, offering data-rate higher than 1Gbps. However, while several implementations of the SpaceFibre IP already exist, its Network Layer is still at experimental level. This article describes the architecture of an implemented SpaceFibre Routing Switch and provides synthesis results for common FPGAs.

The hop-limited adaptive routing (HLAR) mechanism and its enhancement (EHLAR), both tailored for the packet-switched non-geostationary (NGEO) satellite networks, are proposed and evaluated. The proposed routing mechanisms exploit both the predictable topology and inherent multi-path property of the NGEO satellite networks to adaptively distribute the traffic via all feasible neighboring satellites. Specifically, both mechanisms assume that a satellite can send the packets to their destinations via any feasible neighboring satellites, thus the link via the neighboring satellite to the destination satellite is assigned a probability that is proportional to the effective transmission to the destination satellites of the link. The satellite adjusts the link probability based on the packet sending information observed locally for the HLAR mechanism or exchanged between neighboring satellites for the EHLAR mechanism. Besides, the path of the packets are bounded by the maximum hop number, thus avoiding the unnecessary over-detoured packets in the satellite networks. The simulation results corroborate the improved performance of the proposed mechanisms compared with the existing in the literature.

This paper presents an inter-satellite link (ISL) reassignment method to optimize the snapshot routing performance for polar-orbit LEO satellite networks. When the snapshot routing tables are switching simultaneously in all satellites, we propose to reassign the inter-plane ISLs with regularity to improve the quality of the next snapshot, such as snapshot duration, on-board transceiver utilization ratio and end to end delay. Evaluations indicate that our method can attain equal-length snapshots regardless of the latitude of the polar area border, and so is superior to the natural partition method. Meanwhile, compared with the equal partition method which is used in the Iridium system, our method can prolong 82.87% snapshot duration, increase 8.68% on-board transceiver utilization ratio and reduce 5.30% average end to end delay of the whole network. Therefore, we believe that the ISL reassignment method can be efficiently applied in all practical polar-orbit LEO satellite networks.

In this paper, we analyze the rollback traffic in polar-orbit satellite networks that use the snapshot routing algorithm. The concept of diamond rollback links and polar rollback links are presented for the first time, and the numbers of diamond and polar rollback links in polar-orbit satellite networks are concisely formulated. Simulations are performed based on the Iridium and Teledesic system in NS2, and the results finally confirm our analysis. With this work, we can not only simplify the rollback loops avoidance scheme, but also provide guidance for future satellite network routing optimization and topology design.

A transmission control protocol (TCP) using an additive increase multiplicative decrease (AIMD) algorithm for congestion control plays a leading role in advanced Internet services. However, the AIMD method shows only low link utilization in lossy networks with long delay such as satellite networks. This is because the cwnd dynamics of TCP are reduced by long propagation delay, and TCP uses an inadequate congestion control algorithm, which does not distinguish packet loss from wireless errors from that due to congestion of the wireless networks. To overcome these problems, we propose an exponential recovery (ER) TCP that uses the exponential recovery function for rapidly occupying available bandwidth during a congestion avoidance period, and an adaptive congestion window decrease scheme using timestamp base available bandwidth estimation (TABE) to cope with wireless channel errors. We simulate the proposed ER-TCP under various test scenarios using the ns-2 network simulator to verify its performance enhancement. Simulation results show that the proposal is a more suitable TCP than the several TCP variants under long delay and heavy loss probability environments of satellite networks.

In Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, the user distributions are unbalanced due to the geography and the population dispersion. As a result, some satellites have few traffic loads, while others have heavy traffic loads which often lead to congestion events. In this paper, we propose a novel load balancing method based on congestion prediction. In the proposed method, each satellite detects areas where congestion often occurs and conveys their positions to its adjacent satellites. In those areas, the concerned satellites perform load balancing algorithms to prevent congestion. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through a number of simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme improves packet drop rate, end-to-end delay, and throughput.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have been proposed in recent years to provide broadband network access. This research focuses on Walker Delta type constellation. Walker Delta has overlapping ascending and descending orbits. Although Inter Satellite Links (ISLs) can be utilized between satellites orbiting in the same direction, ISLs cannot be utilized between satellites orbiting in opposite directions. As a result, a Walker Delta Constellation with ISLs has two locally separate overlapping meshes, an ascending and a descending mesh. To reach from one local mesh to the other, the traffic has to pass through the highest latitude intra-plane ISLs. Therefore the propagation delay between terminals connected to different meshes is greater than between terminals connected to the same mesh. Due to characteristic handover of LEO satellites, terminals can connect to a satellite in the other mesh during communication, causing drastic variation of propagation delay which results in degradation of communication quality. These issues can be solved by continuously connecting the communication terminals to the same mesh. In this paper, a satellite selection method for Walker Delta Constellations with double mesh coverage is proposed. It employs geographical location information of the communicating terminals, to connect them to the same mesh. In addition, the proposed method selects the mesh that minimize propagation delay for that communication session. It is shown through simulation that the proposed method is effective in reducing delay and jitter for a connection while improving overall communication quality of the network.