An efficient location-based forwarding strategy for named data networking and LEO satellite communications

Abstract

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations are increasingly gaining attention as future global Internet providers. At the same time, named data networking (NDN) is a new data-centric architecture that has been recently proposed to replace the classic TCP/IP architecture since it is particularly well suited to the most common usage of the Internet nowadays as a content delivery network. Certainly, the use of NDN is especially convenient in highly dynamic network environments, such as those of next LEO constellations incorporating inter-satellite links (ISL). Among other native facilities, such as inbuilt security, NDN readily supports the mobility of clients, thus helping to overcome one of the main problems raised in LEO satellite networks. Moreover, thanks to a stateful forwarding plane with support for multicast transmission and inbuilt data caches, NDN is also able to provide a more efficient usage of the installed transmission capacity. In this paper, we propose a new location-based forwarding strategy for LEO satellite networks that takes advantage of the knowledge of the relative position of the satellites and the grid structure formed by the ISLs to perform the forwarding of NDN packets. So, forwarding at each node is done using only local information (node and destination locations), without the need of interchanging information between nodes, as is the case with conventional routing protocols. Using simulation, we show that the proposed forwarding strategy is a good candidate to promote the efficient and effective future use of the NDN architecture in LEO satellite networks.