A Novel Adaptive Routing Algorithm for Delay-Sensitive Service in Multihop LEO Satellite Network

The Low Earth Orbit satellite network has the unique characteristics of the non-uniform and time-variant traffic load distribution, which often causes severe link congestion and thus results in poor performance for delay-sensitive flows, especially when the network is heavily loaded. To solve this problem, a novel adaptive routing algorithm, referred to as the delay-oriented adaptive routing algorithm (DOAR), is proposed. Different from current reactive schemes, DOAR employs Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector (DSDV) routing algorithm, which is a proactive scheme. DSDV is extended to a multipath QoS version to generate alternative routes in active with real-time delay metric, which leads to two significant advantages. First, the flows can be timely and accurately detected for route adjustment. Second, it enables fast, flexible, and optimized QoS matching between the alternative routes and adjustment requiring flows and meanwhile avoids delay growth caused by increased hop number and diffused congestion range. In addition, a retrospective route adjustment requesting scheme is designed in DOAR to enlarge the alternative routes set in the severe congestion state in a large area. Simulation result suggests that DOAR performs better than typical adaptive routing algorithms in terms of the throughput and the delay in a variety of traffic intensity.