A Simulation Study of Source Routing for Load Balancing in Software-Defined Satellite Networks

In the next generation network, the satellite network will play a fundamental role, in overcoming the limitation of the terrestrial network. Nonetheless, the satellite-terrestrial network integration presents a number of problems due to the time-variant topology of the first. One of the most important is the routing process of such networks. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature since the 1990s, and in recent years, the development of modern technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) led to new possible approaches to the routing of satellite network. In this paper, a graph-based, source routing algorithm is presented. The algorithm exploits reliability and flexibility of the SDN architecture and the simplicity of source routing to tackle the dynamic topology of the network, providing rerouting solutions when necessary.