Capacity provisioning and failure recovery for Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation

This paper considers the link capacity requirement for an LEO satellite constellation. We model the constellation as an N N mesh-torus topology under a uniform all-to-all traffic model. Both primary capacity and spare capacity for recovering from a link or node failure are examined. In both cases, we use a method of ‘cuts on a graph’ to obtain lower bounds on capacity requirements and subsequently find algorithms for routing and failure recovery that meet these bounds. Finally, we quantify the benefits of path-based restoration over that of link-based restoration; specifically, we find that the spare capacity requirement for a link-based restoration scheme is nearly N times that for a path-based scheme. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.