Topology-Aware Approach for Reducing Power Consumption in LEO Satellite Constellations

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a class of energy-aware approach that explicitly takes into account the connectivity of the remaining LEO satellite network. We propose a novel approach to switch off some eclipsed Inter-Satellite links (ISLs) while keeping the network connectivity of the remaining LEO satellite network above a particular degree of connectivity. The importance of a link is characterized by the algebraic connectivity of the remaining graph when that link turns off. Differently from approaches that have been proposed in the literature, our solution is completely topology-aware approach, this approach does not consider traffic distribution among paths. It leverages the algebraic connectivity of the graph modeling for LEO satellite network, in order to detect the set of eclipsed satellite links to be switched off. Our algorithm named MTEKCH has lower complexity than traffic-aware approach. And it can be integrated more easily into the IP routing protocol. We show that our proposed algorithm is more robust in terms of network connectivity compared to the traffic-aware approach. Moreover, its performance is comparable to the traffic-aware approach