Multi-Protocol Location Forwarding (MPLF) for Space Routing

The structure and routing architecture design is critical for achieving low latency and high capacity in future LEO space networks (SNs). Existing studies mainly focus on topologies of space networks, but there is a lack of analysis on constellation structures, which can greatly affect network performance. In addition, some routing architectures are designed for networks with a small number of network nodes such as Iridium while they introduce significant network overhead for high-density networks (i.e., mega-constellation networks containing thousands of satellites). In this paper, we conduct the quantitatively study on the design of network structure and routing architecture in space. The high density, high dynamics, and large scale nature of emerging Space Networks (SNs) pose significant challenges, such as unstable routing paths, low network reachability, high latency, and large jitter. To alleviate the above challenges, we design the structure of space network to maximum the connectivity through wisely adjusting the inter-plane inter satellite link. We further propose Multi-Protocol Location Forwarding (MPLF), a distributed routing architecture, targeting at minimizing the propagation latency with a distributed, convergence-free routing paradigm, while keeping routing stable and maximum the path diversity. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on a customized platform \textit{Space Networking Kits} (SNK) which demonstrate that our solution can outperform existing related schemes by about 14\% reduction of propagation latency and 66\% reduction of hops-count on average, while sustaining a high path diversity with only $O(1)$ time complexity.