On-Demand Routing in LEO Mega-Constellations With Dynamic Laser Inter-Satellite Links

Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite mega-constellations are beginning to include laser inter-satellite links (LISLs) to extend the Internet to the most remote locations on Earth. Since the process of establishing these links incurs a setup delay on the order of seconds, a static network topology is generally established well in advance, which is then used for the routing calculations. However, this involves keeping links active even when they are not being used to forward traffic, leading to a poor energy efficiency. Motivated by technological advances that are gradually decreasing the LISL setup delays, we foresee scenarios in which it will be possible to compute routes and establish dynamic LISLs on demand. This will require considering setup delays as penalties that will affect the end-to-end latency. In this article, we present a nonlinear optimization model that considers these penalties in the cost function and propose three heuristic algorithms that solve the problem in a tractable way. The algorithms establish different tradeoffs in terms of performance and computational complexity. We extensively analyze metrics including average latency, route change rate, outage probability, and jitter, in Starlink's Phase I version 2 constellation. The results show the benefit of adaptive routing schemes according to the link setup delay. In particular, more complex schemes are able to decrease the average end-to-end latency, in exchange for an increase in the execution time. On the other hand, depending on the maximum values of tolerated latency, it is possible to use less computationally complex schemes, which will be more scalable for the satellite mega-constellations of the future.