Optimizing Satellite Network Infrastructure: A Joint Approach to Gateway Placement and Routing

TL;DR

This paper presents a joint optimization framework for satellite network infrastructure that balances gateway placement, routing, and flow management to improve performance and reduce costs.

Contribution

It introduces a mixed-integer optimization model that simultaneously optimizes gateway placement, routing, and flow, considering cost and latency trade-offs.

Findings

Reduces the number of active gateways effectively.

Balances gateway count and latency through cost function weights.

Demonstrates impact of different weights on network performance.

Abstract

Satellite constellation systems are becoming more attractive to provide communication services worldwide, especially in areas without network connectivity. While optimizing satellite gateway placement is crucial for operators to minimize deployment and operating costs, reducing the number of gateways may require more inter-satellite link hops to reach the ground network, thereby increasing latency. Therefore, it is of significant importance to develop a framework that optimizes gateway placement, dynamic routing, and flow management in inter-satellite links to enhance network performance. To this end, we model an optimization problem as a mixed-integer problem with a cost function combining the number of gateways, flow allocation, and traffic latency, allowing satellite operators to set priorities based on their policies. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed approach effectively reduces the number of active gateways by selecting their most appropriate locations while balancing the trade-off between the number of gateways and traffic latency. Furthermore, we demonstrate the impact of different weights in the cost function on performance through comparative analysis.