A Comparative Study on Routing Convergence of IP-Based and ICN-Based Routing Protocols in Satellite Networks

The mobility of satellites makes it highly challenging to design routing protocols for satellite networks. In this paper, we investigate the adaptability of IP-based and ICN-based routing protocols in satellite networks. Specifically, we conduct a comparative study on the classic IP-based and ICN-based routing mechanisms (i.e., OSPF and NLSR). Moreover, we implement the above routing protocols on OMNeT++ and present extensive comparative simulation results to explore the impact of satellite mobility on the convergence time and messaging overhead. We unveil several critical and counter-intuitive insights in terms of the snapshot length (i.e., period of a stable topology) as well as the convergence time and messaging overhead incurred by OSPF and NLSR in satellite networks. First, the evaluation results show that the snapshot length in a small-scale constellation may not be larger than that of a large-scale constellation. Second, OSPF converges at least 43.49% faster and incurs less messaging overhead than NLSR.