Orthodromic Routing and Forwarding for Large Satellite Constellations

Abstract: Low earth orbit satellite constellations with intersatellite links (ISLs) are currently being developed and deployed. The availability of ISLs provides the capability to route across the satellite constellation, rather than using the satellite as a single hop in a bent-pipe configuration. We present a fully distributed solution to routing and forwarding which we call Orthodromic Routing (OR(r) ). OR(r) routing is built on a foundation of both geographic and link state routing to create a hybrid protocol which scales to enormous constellations with excellent failure handling. Our work includes an addressing and forwarding plane for OR(r)which can be implemented in hardware in a highly parallel manner to achieve line rates while only requiring a bounded number of forwarding table entries.