Data Naming Mechanism of LEO Satellite Mega-Constellations for the Internet of Things

The low earth orbit (LEO) mega constellation for the internet of thing (IoT) has become one of the hot spots for B5G and 6G concerns. Information-centric networking (ICN) provides a new approach to the interconnection of everything in the LEO mega constellation. In ICN, data objects are independent of location, application, storage and transport methods. Therefore, data naming is one of the fundamental issues of ICN, and research on the data naming mechanism of the LEO mega constellation for the IoT is thus the focus of this study. Adopting a fusion of hierarchical, multicomponent, and hash flat as one structure, a data naming mechanism is proposed, which can meet the needs of the IoT multiservice attributes and high-performance transmission. Additionally, prefix tokens are used to describe hierarchical names with various embedded semantic functions to support multisource content retrieval for in-network functions. To verify the performance of the proposed data naming mechanism, an NS-3-based simulation platform for LEO mega constellations for the IoT is designed and developed. The test simulation results show that, compared with the IP address, the ICN-HMcH naming mechanism can increase throughput by as much as 54% and reduce the transmission delay of the LEO mega satellites for the IoT by 53.97%. The proposed data naming mechanism can provide high quality of service (QoS) transmission performance for the LEO mega constellation for IoT and performs better than IP-based transmission.