Satellite over satellite (SOS) network: a novel concept of hierarchical architecture and routing in satellite network

Abstract

Satellite systems have been proposed previously for broadband data and multimedia services. Many systems need a great number of satellites to provide global broadband services with limited frequencies, and each satellite may have a number of direct inter-satellite links (ISLs) that are mutually visible satellites. But, in case where long distance dependent (LDD) and multimedia traffic dominates, performances in terms of the overall network decrease, because of traffic transfer via many ISLs on the routing path. To solve these problems, we have proposed a novel topological design for a broadband satellite network, the so-called satellite over satellite (SOS) network that has a hierarchical satellite constellation with multiple layers. In this paper, we present a hierarchical satellite routing protocol (HSRP) that is a hierarchical, dynamic and QoS adaptive routing protocol for LDD multimedia traffic in the SOS network. We also introduce the good characteristics of the SOS architecture and HSRP by simulations of performance evaluations.