A Multicast Routing Algorithm for GEO/LEO Satellite IP Networks

Satellite network has played an important role in providing multicast services for its ability of wide coverage. The performance of satellite multicast can be improved if multi-layer Satellites are used in the architecture. In this paper, combining LEO satellites´ advantages on transmitting real-time information with GEO´s ability of big computing, a GEO/LEO Double-Layer Multicast Routing Algorithm (DLMRA) is introduced. Using the logical location concept to calculate the first added destination, take the permanent of link into account, our algorithm aims to minimize cost of multicast trees, under the condition of the available bandwidth bound and multicast tree delay bound. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance benefits of the proposed DLMRA in terms of the tree delay, the bandwidth cost by comparison with the other algorithms proposed before.