Title of Presentation: Network Mobility in Satellite Network
Primary (Corresponding) Author Mohammed Atiquzzaman
Organization of Primary Author:
Co-Authors: Abu Shahriar
Abstract: Satellites carry various types of equipment for observing the Earth and space. The equipment in future LEO satellites are expected to be IP-enabled and will be accessible from the Earth through the Internet using ground stations. Rotation of the satellite causes these equipment to be handed off between ground stations and thus will require mobility support. The mobility of each of the equipment can be managed individually by Mobile IP (MIP) or Mobile IP version 6 (MIPv6) designed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The mobility management of the individual equipment generates a lot of signaling traffic in the wireless medium. To reduce the signaling overhead, IETF introduced the concept of Network Mobility (NEMO) where mobile nodes connected to a Local Area Network (LAN) will move as a unit under a router. Therefore, if the equipment in a satellite were connected to an on-board LAN, the concept of NEMO can be applied to on-board LAN and equipment. NEMO Basic Support Protocol (BSP), the IETF standard to handle network mobility, introduces problems such as sub-optimal routing, additional header in the packets, packet loss and delay during handoff. Although research efforts are being undertaken to solve those problems, route optimization and handoff are separately considered in most of these efforts. The signaling traffic of the route optimization schemes also affect the performance of the handoff. In this paper, we address the applicability of NEMO for managing handoffs in satellite networks, with emphasis on the problems of NEMO BSP that have to be solved to allow NEMO to work effectively in space networks. Our objective is to optimize the performance of NEMO, considering both the routing path and the handoff delay for the entire network. This research exploits the deterministic mobility patterns of the satellites and the communication characteristics of the satellite devices e.g. mobility awareness of the equipment, mobility to connection ratio, etc. We use simulations to demonstrate the applicability of our system to satellite and terrestrial networks.