A Lightweight and Scalable Design of Segment Routing in Broadband LEO Constellations Using Landmark-Based Skeleton Graphs

Abstract: Emerging Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband constellations hold significant potential to provide advanced Internet services due to inherent geometric features of the grid topology. However, high dynamics, unstable topology changes, and frequent route updates bring significant challenge to fast and adaptive routing policies. In addition, since computing, bandwidth, and storage resources in each LEO satellite is strictly limited, traffic demands are typically unbalanced, further enlarging the challenge to scalable routing policies with load balancing. Nevertheless, most existing research failed to address the above difficulties. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight and scalable protocol of segment routing through landmark-based skeleton graphs. To improve the overall performance, we design an efficient multipath segment routing algorithm. First, the algorithm partitions the network into multiple regions to construct skeleton paths, which can effectively guide packet forwarding and reduce the operating costs. In each region, multipath probabilistic routing is used to achieve uniform traffic distribution, avoiding hotspot congestion. Furthermore, the flexible hierarchical partitioning and localized segmented routing is employed for fine-grained traffic control and QoS guarantee combined with adaptive local single-path routing. Finally, experimental results validate our method's superior performance in terms of response time and network utility.