Multicast Communications with Uplink Broadcast in a Proliferated Low Earth Orbit Satellite Network

A proliferated LEO satellite network can provide many resilient communication services that are essential to the military. The ubiquity of its presence, the diversity of the provided data paths, and the improved signal-to-noise ratio all contribute to the enormous interest in pLEO network systems. In this paper, we propose a novel multicast tree construction protocol for a group of ground users communicating through a pLEO satellite network. The proposed protocol is jamming resistant in that it takes advantage of the multiple satellites available, hence multiple paths, to receive a ground user's data. Adversaries will need to jam all available paths to prevent the reception of user data at the satellites. However, this poten-tially results in the reception of redundant packets at multiple satellites. To enable the efficient forwarding of this data to the destination users, our protocol builds an efficient multicast tree. With redundant packet checks and an efficient multicast tree, we reduce the number of satellite transmissions required to disseminate a packet to a geographically distributed group of users. Depending on the size of area in which users are located, we construct a single multicast tree or two multicast trees using satellites moving in the same direction. The use of two multicast trees serves groups of users in concentrated location distributions more efficiently, while a single tree is more efficient for distributing traffic to a group of users with widely dispersed locations.<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup><sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release. Distri-bution is unlimited. This material is based upon work supported by the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.