Handover Scheme in LEO Satellite Networks Based on QoE for Streaming Media Services

The development of satellite communications has received considerable attention in recent years. Early satellite communications were dominated by voice and low-speed data services, but now they must support high-speed multimedia services. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, because of their lower altitude orbits, have much smaller transmission loss and delay than Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, and they are an important part of the future realization of high-bandwidth and low-latency multimedia services. Among them, the on-demand streaming service has a large number of users in terrestrial communication and is also an important service component that will be in satellite communication environments in the future. However, LEO satellites face many challenges in handover and accessing due to their fast moving speed. Although many handover and access schemes for LEO satellites have been proposed and evaluated in existing studies, most of them stay at the level of quality of service (QoS), and few of them have been studied at the level of quality of experience (QoE). These studies also rarely consider the performance of multimedia services, including streaming services, in satellite communication environments, and there is no relevant simulation system to evaluate and examine them. Therefore, this paper builds a simulation system for streaming services in LEO satellite communication environments in order to simulate the initial buffering, rebuffering, and idle state of the users during service. Then, access and handover schemes for the QoE level of streaming service are proposed. Finally, our proposed scheme is evaluated based on this simulation system. From the simulation results, the simulation system proposed in this paper can successfully realize the various functions of users in on-demand streaming services and record the initial buffering and rebuffering events of users. And the streaming QoE-based access and handover scheme proposed in this paper can perform well in satellites, which operate within a resource-constrained environment.