On the Trade-off Analysis of Centralized and Distributed Routing in Delay Tolerant Satellite Networks

RAVERTA, FERNANDO; FRAIRE, JUAN A.; MADOERY, PABLO G.; FINOCHIETTO, JORGE M.

Valdivia

Conferencia; IV School of Systems and Networks (SSN 2018); 2018

Given that satellite networks cannot assumecontinuous connectivity among nodes, an ar-chitecture known as Delay Tolerant Network-ing (DTN) has been proposed as an appealingcommunication paradigm. However, as spacenetworks continue to grow in both numberand size, the process of routing and forward-ing traffic is rapidly becoming computation-ally expensive and challenging. Since thesenetworks usually exhibit predictable trajec-tories and communication opportunities, theresearch community has proposed to providenodes with scheduled contact plans in advancein order to make distributed routing decisionsas they generate or receive traffic. On theother hand, a more attractive solution for theconservative space industry seems to be a cen-tralized scheme. Based on a Software-DefinedNetwork (SDN) approach, a route table can becomputed on ground and then provisioned tonodes in space, which would no longer run anyrouting intelligence on board, only forward-ing. In this work we analyze the dichotomybetween distributed and centralized routingschemes in the context of DTN and provideinsights regarding important aspects to takeinto account when designing and managingsatellite networks.