Improving Integrated Terrestrial-Satellite Network Utilization using Near-Optimal Segment Routing

The dynamic topology of integrated terrestrial-satellite networks and limited resources in space segment bring challenges to the design of efficient routing and traffic engineering (TE) schemes. In this paper, we proposed a segment routing based routing/TE framework for integrated terrestrial-satellite networks. In particular, we showed that near-optimal performance can be obtained with a limited number of middle nodes placed in the segments compared to multi-commodity flow. Furthermore, we formulated the segment routing problem with maximum profit as a primal-dual set cover problem, and presented an online heuristic algorithm to solve the optimization problem. We have proven that the proposed algorithm is $\left[ {\frac{1}{2},\log d} \right]$-competitive. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional satellite algorithms in terms of throughput and rejection probability. In addition, we presented an implementation architecture of the segment routing in integrated terrestrial-satellite networks.