Low Earth Orbit
(LEO) satellite systems provide global coverage with short round trip delays.
Moreover, Earth terminals can reach the LEO satellites with low-power signals,
which simplifies their design and reduces their size. Hence, local networks
and individual terminals can be connected to the rest of the world over
LEO satellite networks simply by installing small satellite interfaces.
With these properties, LEO satellite systems play a crucial role in the
global Internet to support real-time and non-real time applications. Routing
and multicasting in LEO satellite systems are the key issues to support
of this project is to develop new and efficient routing protocols for unicast
and multicast applications with different traffic types and heterogeneous
QoS requirements. The existing solutions developed for fixed networks cannot
be applied to the satellite network because they cannot handle the frequent
topological changes of the LEO satellite systems. On the other hand, the
solutions developed for terrestrial mobile ad hoc networks incur high protocol
overhead since they do not consider nodes with predictive movement patterns.
The novelty of the new protocols developed in this project is that they
effectively capture the movement patterns of LEO satellites and their
interconnectivity structure while keeping the protocol overhead at a minimum
level and delivering high performance. These protocols can easily be implemented
in software or firmware onboard the satellites and configured for various
satellite constellations and parameters. Consequently, they constitute
a strong and flexible set of solutions to the routing and multicasting
problem in LEO satellite networks.