Research on hierarchical location management scheme in LEO satellite networks

Satellite handover happens frequently in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network due to satellite´s high mobility. The mobility management cost is high when Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is applied to LEO satellite networks. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical location management scheme to reduce the mobility management cost using an initial access satellite of mobile node as mobility anchor node (MAP). By taking the threshold of handover times to distinguish between global update and local update, mobile node (MN) updates its location information at satellite MAP when the handover times doesn´t exceed the threshold. Only when the handover times exceeded the threshold, MN needs to send location update massages to its home agent and corresponding nodes. Numerical results show that the management cost of the proposed scheme is lower than that of Seamless IP diversity based Generalized Mobility Architecture (SIGMA), and packet loss rate is lower than that of MIPv6.