On Multicast Routing Using Rectilinear Steiner Trees for LEO Satellite Networks

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth-efficient multicast routing mechanism using rectilinear Steiner trees for Internet Protocol (IP)-based low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. Different from existing work that minimizes the end-to-end delay, our mechanism minimizes the total bandwidth, i.e., the number of hops, for a multicast tree since the wireless bandwidth in satellite networks is a limited and scarce resource. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem and propose a distributed algorithm and a protocol to support the dynamic group membership for multicasting over LEO satellite networks. Our simulation results show that the trees created by our mechanism consume less bandwidth than the shortest path trees. The difference between the optimal solutions and the solutions obtained by our distributed algorithm is within 5%. Furthermore, our protocol has a limited overhead and can support a large number of group members.