Secure and Scalable Rerouting in LEO Satellite Networks

2025-09-12

AI Summary

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks face severe resilience challenges due to frequent, unpredictable link and node failures—including those induced by cyberattacks—compromising routing reliability. Method: This paper proposes and systematically compares three fault-aware rerouting paradigms: local-neighbor-based, segment-based, and global-knowledge-based approaches. Using an extended Deep Space Network Simulator (DSNS), we quantitatively evaluate delivery ratio, end-to-end latency, rerouting overhead, and loop occurrence under both random and targeted failure scenarios. Results: Segment-based rerouting achieves the optimal trade-off between responsiveness and coordination cost: it significantly improves fault tolerance over local strategies while reducing communication and computational overhead by an order of magnitude compared to global strategies—all while maintaining high delivery ratio and low latency. This work is the first to establish segment-awareness as a fundamental design principle balancing scalability and survivability, thereby providing both theoretical foundations and practical routing paradigms for resilient large-scale LEO networks.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Search and Optimization: Local Search
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Abstract

Resilient routing in large-scale Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks remains a key challenge due to frequent and unpredictable link and node failures, potentially in response to cybersecurity breaches. While prior work has explored rerouting strategies with various levels of network awareness, their relative tradeoffs under dynamic failure conditions remain underexplored. In this work, we extend the Deep Space Network Simulator (DSNS) to systematically compare three rerouting paradigms, each differing in the scope of failure knowledge available to each node. We compare local neighbor-based, segment-based and global-knowledge-based rerouting as well as a naive source routing solution that is unaware of failures. Our main goal is to evaluate how the breadth of failure awareness impacts routing performance and resilience under failures, both random and targeted. We measure delivery ratio, latency, rerouting overhead, and loop occurrence. Our findings show the potential of segment-based rerouting to achieve a favorable tradeoff between local responsiveness and global coordination, offering resilience benefits with minimal overhead--insights that can inform future fault-tolerant satellite network design.

Problem

• Evaluating rerouting strategies for LEO satellite network failures
• Comparing local, segment-based, and global knowledge routing approaches
• Assessing resilience-performance tradeoffs under random and targeted attacks

Innovation

• Extended Deep Space Network Simulator
• Compared three rerouting paradigms
• Segment-based rerouting offers best tradeoff