Performance Evaluation of Selection Strategies for Inter-Satellite Paths in Walker-Delta Constellations
2026-06-22 • Networking and Internet Architecture
Networking and Internet Architecture
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how choosing different routes (paths) for sending data between user terminals and gateways in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks affects communication. They look at factors like the length of these paths, how often the paths need to change, and how many satellite links are used. By testing three ways to pick paths on a network of over 1,100 satellites, they find that the choice of path greatly affects how fast communication is and how complicated managing the network becomes. Their work helps understand the trade-offs in routing decisions in satellite constellations.
LEO satellite constellationsuser terminalgatewaypath selectionhop countlatencyWalker-Delta constellationpath churnsatellite routing
Authors
Marvin Felix Braun, Moritz Flüchter, Michael Menth
Abstract
In LEO satellite constellations, traffic between a user terminal and a gateway is carried over a satellite path. As the satellite constellation rotates around Earth, a new path must be reselected repeatedly from a set of path candidates. In this paper, we study the impact of path selection strategies on several metrics: path length in terms of Euclidean distance and hop count, path-change rate, and rate of used links. These metrics are relevant because they affect either communication latency or the complexity of control and resource management. We explain how path candidates are generated, define three heuristic path selection strategies, and evaluate them over a large set of UT-GW scenarios within a single shell of a Walker-Delta constellation with 1,156 satellites. Overall, the results show that path selection has a significant impact on both latency-related metrics and path churn.