An evolutionary approach towards contact plan design for disruption-tolerant satellite networks

LEGUIZAMÓN, GUILLERMO; FRAIRE, JUAN A.; MADOERY, PABLO G.; MADOERY, PABLO G.; FINOCHIETTO, JORGE M.; FINOCHIETTO, JORGE M.; LEGUIZAMÓN, GUILLERMO; FRAIRE, JUAN A.

APPLIED SOFT COMPUTING

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2017 vol. 52 p. 446 - 456

1568-4946

Delay and disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) are becoming an appealing solution for satellite networkswhere nodes can temporarily store and carry in-transit data until a link with a suitable next-hop becomesavailable. Since satellite trajectories and orientation can be predicted, on-board routing schemes can basethese forwarding decisions on a contact plan comprising all forthcoming communication opportunities.In general, contact plans are previously calculated on ground where their design can be optimized to con-sider not only available spacecraft resources but also the expected traffic which is largely foreseeable inspace applications. Despite optimal contact plan design procedures exist, their computation complexitymight result prohibitive even for medium-sized satellite networks. In this work, we propose an evolu-tionary algorithm to provide sub-optimal yet efficient and implementable contact plans in bounded time.In particular, we depict specific strategies such as encoding and repairing techniques to later evaluate thealgorithm performance in a typical scenario demonstrating its usefulness for planning future DTN-basedsatellite networks.