Satellite over satellite (SOS) network: a novel architecture for satellite network

Satellite systems have been proposed recently for broadband data and multimedia services. And many of them need a great number of satellites to provide broadband services with limited frequencies, and each satellite may have a number of direct intersatellite links (ISL) that are mutually visible satellites. But, in case when long-distance-dependent (LDD) traffic dominate, performance in terms of the overall network decrease, because of traffic transfer via many ISL on the routing path. To solve these problems, we propose a new topological design and routing protocol for broadband satellite communication networks. The former is called the satellite-over-satellite (SOS) network which has a multiple layered satellite constellation, and the latter is called the hierarchical QoS routing protocol (HQRP) supporting a simple routing protocol for LDD multimedia traffic. We also introduce the characteristics of SOS and HQRP by simulations of performance evaluations