Reducing power consumption in LEO satellite network

Abstract

Current low earth orbit (LEO) satellite network display poor powerefficiency, running network devices at full capacity all the time regardless of the traffic matrix and the distribution of the population over the Globe. Mostof the research on energy efficiency of LEO satellites has focused oncomponent level or link level. Therefore, this kind of research is not holisticto try to look at the satellite system as a single node. To enhance the energyefficiency. The solution should exploits multipath routing and loadbalancing. LEO network is overprovisioned, and hence selectively shuttingdown some satellite nodes and links during off-peaks hours seems like agood way to reduce energy consumption. In this paper, we exploit the fact that due to geographical and climatic conditions, some satellite links areexpected to be loaded with data while others remain unused. Our approach is to power down satellite nodes and links during period of low traffic, whileguaranteeing the connectivity and QoS. Finding the optimal solution is NPproblem and therefore, we explore in this work two heuristic algorithms. Weevaluate our heuristics on a realistic LEO topology and real traffic matrices.Simulation results show that the power saving can be significant