Alexander Kedrowitsch (Virginia Tech), Jonathan Black (Virginia Tech) Daphne Yao (Virginia Tech)

Inter-satellite links will unlock true global access to high-speed internet delivered by Low Earth Orbit (LEO) mega-constellations. Functional packet routing within the constraints of the space environment, spacecraft design, and continual satellite mobility is uniquely challenging and requires novel routing algorithm approaches. Additionally, recent real-world events have highlighted adversarial attempts to deny and disrupt mega-constellation networking capabilities. In this paper, we advance highly resilient LEO mega-constellation dynamic routing algorithms by presenting our novel, ISL architecture-derived, network coordinate system. This coordinate system simplifies the network topology and permits increasingly impactful routing decisions with minimal computational overhead. From our topology, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept, lightweight routing algorithm that is highly resilient and scalable. To promote standardized resilience comparisons for LEO mega-constellation routing algorithms, we also propose a routing resilience testing framework that defines key performance metrics, adversarial capabilities, and testing scenarios. Using our proposed framework, we demonstrate our routing algorithm’s increased resilience over several state-of-the-art dynamic routing algorithms, with 12% packet delivery rate improvement during high adversarial disruption intensities.