Achieving Resilient and Performance-Guaranteed Routing in Space-Terrestrial Integrated Networks

Satellite routers in emerging space-terrestrial integrated networks (STINs) are operated in a failure-prone, intermittent and resource-constrained space environment, making it very critical but challenging to cope with various network failures effectively. Existing resilient routing approaches either suffer from continuous re-convergences with low network reachability, or involve prohibitive pre-computation and storage overhead due to the huge amount of possible failure scenarios in STINs.

This paper presents STARCURE, a novel resilient routing mechanism for futuristic STINs. STARCURE aims at achieving fast and efficient routing restoration, while maintaining the low-latency, high-bandwidth service capabilities in failure-prone space environments. First, STARCURE incorporates a new network model, called the topology-stabilizing model (TSM) to eliminate topological uncertainty by converting the topology variations caused by various failures to traffic variations. Second, STARCURE adopts an adaptive hybrid routing scheme, collaboratively combining a constraint optimizer to efficiently handle predictable failures, together with a location-guided protection routing strategy to quickly deal with unexpected failures. Extensive evaluations driven by realistic constellation information show that, STARCURE can protect routing against various failures, achieving close-to-100% reachability and better performance restoration with acceptable system overhead, as compared to other existing resilience solutions.