Resource awareness and dynamic load balancing in satellite-ground integrated networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of mobile communications, many applications have covered industry, healthcare, education, transportation, etc. The traditional ground network has limited coverage range and service capacity, which makes it hard to meet the transmission requirements of the above applications. Satellite-ground integrated networks (SGINs) are introduced to improve data rate and enlarge the network capacity. However, the management strategy of communication resources among these heterogeneous nodes differs greatly. Software defined networking (SDN) simplifies network management via decoupling forward plane and control plane, which is beneficial to boosting the central management for SGINs. Based on SDN architecture, we propose perceptual load balancing to make forwarding decisions. Furthermore, we downscale the substrate network to reduce the communication overhead. Massive experiments validate that our proposed multiple resources-aware based dynamic load balancing strategy extends the average network service time for about 24%, while the network overhead of transmitting information is reduced by 80%.