Latitude- and time-zone-aware load balancing in optical satellite networks

Leading by the development of Starlink, the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks are expected to be the customer-grade Internet infrastructure for carrying Internet traffic. In this paper, focusing on network usage fluctuations that are caused by both human activity variations in work and rest time slots and inter-orbital-plane ISL length variations, we introduce the time-zone-based traffic model and the link compensation matrix into the global satellite network. Accordingly, we propose relay routing algorithms to balance the workload of the satellites over different time zones and latitudes, and we also compare the proposed algorithms with the baseline strategies. Then simulation results show that the proposed model and algorithm can achieve a 97.23% reduction in blocking ratio with a 0.29% increase in latency.