Exploring the Reliable Multicast Transport of BGP in Geostationary Satellite Networks Based on Network Coding

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), with its advantages in routing isolation support and mature application, is a promising candidate to integrate satellite systems into the terrestrial IP network. However, with more and more ground stations accessing satellites by BGP, a significant amount of routing overhead can be produced on limited satellite links, especially for geostationary satellite networks with thousands of accessing terminals in extremely large areas. To solve this challenge, multicast transport of BGP was proposed, which takes advantage of the inherent broadcast property of wireless channels. However, its performance can be seriously degraded when interfered with the environment. In this paper, NCSR (Network Coding for Satellite network BGP Routing transport) [1] is explored in depth. Unlike existing counterparts, NCSR pays more attention to the lossy space links and can achieve reliability with more bandwidth savings. A greedy based coding algorithm is proposed to realize the network coding operation. To demonstrate the efficiency of NCSR, we conduct theoretical analyses and extensive simulations in typical scenarios of satellite systems. Simulation results show that NCSR can greatly reduce the bandwidth usage while achieving comparable latency. Discussions on practical considerations when applying network coding method for reliability assurance are also presented in detail.