AROA: optical-ISL-overlap-aware anonymous path selection in optical satellite networks

Recent conflicts underscore the need for robust privacy in cross-border communications over optical satellite networks (OSNs). While optical inter-satellite links (O-ISLs) resist eavesdropping, constellation-level route determinism and beam scheduling increase path observability, enabling traffic correlation. We present AROA, an area-aware, randomized O-ISL anonymization algorithm integrated into an anonymous optical satellite-network (AOSN) architecture for high-value users. AROA combines source-routed paths, multi-hop encryption, and geo-fenced relay randomization to balance privacy and latency, leveraging low-latency, high-throughput O-ISLs while avoiding reliance on local operators. We evaluate AOSN in two national-level confrontation scenarios. Under large-scale, short-term intrusions, AOSN reduces the median privacy-leakage probability by up to 94.62%; under small-scale, long-term intrusions, it keeps the adversary’s 90th-percentile monitored time below 10.2% of the observation window when three satellites are compromised. Experiments on three satellite-computing payloads demonstrate 80 Mbps per channel and ≈15.67ms per-payload processing latency.