On multicast routing using rectilinear Steiner trees for LEO satellite networks

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth-efficient multicast routing mechanism using rectilinear Steiner trees for IP-based LEO satellite networks. Different from the previous approach which minimizes the end-to-end delay, our mechanism minimizes the total bandwidth, i.e, the number of hops, used by a multicast tree since the wireless bandwidth in satellite networks is a limited and scarce resource. We propose a new integer linear programming formulation for network planning and a distributed algorithm for protocol design. Our simulation results show that the trees created by our approach use less bandwidth than shortest-path trees. Moreover, the difference of the optimal solutions and the solutions obtained by our distributed algorithm is within 5% on average.