Handover Scheme in LEO Satellite Networks Based on QoE for Streaming 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 are an important part of the future realization of high-bandwidth and low-latency multimedia services. However, LEO satellites face many challenges in accessing and handover due to their fast-moving speed. For example, few studies have been conducted on the performance of multimedia services (including streaming services) in satellite communication environments at the Quality of Experience (QoE) level, and there are no relevant simulation systems to evaluate and examine them. Therefore, this paper builds a simulation system for streaming media services in LEO satellite communication scenarios in order to simulate the initial buffering, rebuffering, and idle state of the users during service. Then, an access and handover scheme for the QoE level of streaming media service is 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 media services. And the streaming QoE-based access and handover scheme can perform well in satellite, a resource-constrained scenario.