Satellite Mobility Pattern based Handover Management Algorithm in LEO Satellites

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have important advantages over Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) systems such as low propagation delay, low power requirements and more efficient spectrum allocation due to frequency reuse between satellites and spotbeams. However, one of the major problems with LEO satellites is their high speed relative to the terrestrial mobile terminals, which move at lower speeds but at more random directions. Therefore, mobility management becomes more challenging with LEO satellites. Efficient and accurate methods are needed for satellite handovers between the moving footprints produced by the satellite multi-beam antennas. The main concern is providing a reliable service to the user that prevents a communication from being dropped due to a handover. In this paper, we first define the pattern of a satellite by using the fact that a satellite passes over the same geographical area of the Earth in repeating periods of time, and then we propose an efficient handover management strategy for LEO satellites that takes mobility pattern of both satellites and mobile terminals into account. To show the performance of the proposed algorithm, we run an extensive set of simulations both for the proposed algorithm and well known handover management methods as a baseline model. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is very promising for seamless handover in LEO satellites.