Double-edge Location Management in LEO Constellation with Software-defined Features

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems have emerged as a key technology for achieving comprehensive global communication coverage, primarily due to their inherent advantage of low end-to-end latency. However, the large-scale and highly dynamic nature of LEO constellations poses significant challenges, including frequent location updates and terminal handovers, which substantially increase the costs of location management. Typical location management solutions include centralized Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and distributed mobility management (DMM), which face problems such as redundant signaling and complex global location synchronization. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel double-edge location management architecture (DLMMA). In this architecture, satellites are divided into centralized units (CU) and distributed units (DU), which are organized into management clusters. CU satellites serve as one edge, and terminals only need to register and update their locations on the CU satellite of the current access cluster. The ground-based Software Defined Network (SDN) controller acts as the other edge, collaborating with CU satellites to perform global location updates, reducing the number of hops for terminal location management and lowering location management costs. The simulation results show that, compared to the two typical solutions, DLMMA has significant advantages in location management costs and transmission delay of communication requests.