Benchmarking of Routing Protocols for Layered Satellite Networks

As a key part of next generation network (NGN) infrastructure, next generation broadband satellite networks are expected to support a variety of applications with diverse performance requirements. Research on the onboard routing protocols is the primary step to meet the various QoS related requirements, which becomes feasible with the rapid development of onboard processing capacity of satellite. In the paper, we evaluate the more fundamental metric of convergence rate of RIP, OSPF, DRDT and MLSR routing protocols under various satellite network scenarios based on simulation. Though many literatures have argued that the routing protocols running in terrestrial networks do not fit well for satellite networks, this paper presents the simulation-based evaluation of typical terrestrial routing protocols in satellite settings quantitatively and serves as a benchmark for satellite network routing protocol development and performance evaluation