Maximum lifetime routing with guaranteed throughput in LEO satellite networks

An important consideration for LEO satellite networks is choosing suitable routes to prolong the network lifetime while stringently guarantee the throughput requirement. However, both the highly dynamic network topology and intrinsically time-varying renewable energy availability pose great constraints and challenges in designing such routing schemes. To solve the problem, we resort to Capacity Region Evolving Graph (CREG) and formulate the throughput constrained maximum lifetime routing problem. Unfortunately, solving the problem without exploiting its special structure is indeed time-consuming, since multiple time intervals must be jointly handled. Two efficient routing algorithms, namely, Maximum Lifetime Routing (MLR) and Shortest Path-based Progressive Routing (SPPR), are thus proposed to reduce the execution time of solving the routing problem. Specifically, MLR decomposes the problem into multiple independent subproblems without trading its optimality, while SPPR exploits the deterministic mobility of satellite networks without solving the optimization problem. Simulation results verify that prolonged network lifetime and balanced traffic distribution can be obtained for both the routing algorithms.