IP Tunneling Based for Mobility Management in LEO Constellation Networks

Abstract

LEO constellation networks, with their advantages of high throughput, wide coverage and strong robustness, have become a key solution to meet future demands for massive data communications and global coverage. However, due to the high-speed movement of low orbit satellites relative to the ground, mobility management is one of the most challenging research topics for enabling mobility service in LEO satellite networks. In this paper, we propose an IP tunneling based scheme for handling the relative mobility between space and ground. The LEO satellite network consists of the access network and the transmission network. The access network includes the user terminals, the space base station on satellite, and the core network in gateway. The transmission network includes the space router, inter-satellite link, feeder link, and the ground router. In the IP tunneling scheme, the access network and the transmission network belong to two networks respectively, where general routing algorithm is used to handle the relative mobility between the satellites and ground stations, and the IP tunneling is used to handle the relative mobility between the satellites and user terminals. Compared with the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), the IP tunneling scheme achieves better performance in terms of signaling overhead, memory overhead and switch delay. Analysis result shows that the IP tunneling scheme can greatly reduce the demand of on-board resources.