Performance Evaluation of Selection Strategies for Inter-Satellite Paths in Walker-Delta Constellations

2026-06-22

AI Summary

This study addresses the increased communication latency and control complexity in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations caused by frequent path reselection. Focusing on Walker-Delta constellations, the work proposes and evaluates three heuristic inter-satellite routing strategies, systematically quantifying their impact on end-to-end delay, hop count, handover frequency, and link load. Using a single-layer constellation model comprising 1,156 satellites, the experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly reduce path dynamics and transmission latency. These findings offer novel insights and empirical support for efficient resource scheduling in large-scale LEO networks.

Abstract

In LEO satellite constellations, traffic between a user terminal and a gateway is carried over a satellite path. As the satellite constellation rotates around Earth, a new path must be reselected repeatedly from a set of path candidates. In this paper, we study the impact of path selection strategies on several metrics: path length in terms of Euclidean distance and hop count, path-change rate, and rate of used links. These metrics are relevant because they affect either communication latency or the complexity of control and resource management. We explain how path candidates are generated, define three heuristic path selection strategies, and evaluate them over a large set of UT-GW scenarios within a single shell of a Walker-Delta constellation with 1,156 satellites. Overall, the results show that path selection has a significant impact on both latency-related metrics and path churn.

Problem

• LEO satellite constellations
• path selection
• communication latency
• path-change rate
• Walker-Delta constellation

Innovation

• path selection strategies
• LEO satellite constellations
• Walker-Delta constellation
• inter-satellite routing
• path churn