A Partial Scattered Load Balancing Algorithm for LEO Mega-Constellation Networks

Due to the imbalance distribution of the ground traffic demand and the high mobility of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, how to balance network load under dynamic topology is a key challenge for LEO communication networks. However, the conventional load balancing strategy mainly relies on collecting global information and the whole directed graph, which leads to low convergence speed. To enable the fast routing update of load balancing, this paper proposes a partial scattered load balancing (PSLB) algorithm that considers the size of different data flows and reroutes a suitable portion of data flows to new paths, which are calculated by a reduced directed graph. For cutting the directed graph, we jointly consider the relationship between the link load and the number of flows to speed up the routing convergence without excessively shrinking the directed graph, and achieve balance between the increasing of hop count and the amount of rerouted traffic load. PSLB algorithm reduces the load gap among mega constellation networks, which has the lowest convergence time and overall transmission delay compared with other benchmarks.