Towards Efficient Traffic Engineering via

Distributed Optimization in Large-Scale LEO Constellation

2024.02.29

1
Background
The promising low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation projects such as
SpaceX Starlink have developed to a considerable scale, expected to provide
global broadband network services in the near future.

2
Background
The distribution of land and oceans on Earth determines the distribution of human
populations, and the activities of people also influences the network traffic around
the world. Traffic on satellite networks originates from terrestrial networks,
leading to an unbalance in traffic distribution across satellite networks.

The device density all over the world. Daily variation of traffic intensity. 3
Background
The routing strategies significantly influence
how traffic is distributed across the satellite
network. The unbalanced traffic can result in
congestion in high-demand links while also
leading to underutilization of resources in
less active areas. A typical scenario of the traffic flows
in the satellite networks.

How can traffic routing be optimized for effective traffic engineering

in large-scale LEO constellations?
4
 Related Work
They investigated the unicast and multicast TE problem to provide Internet
service in SDN-enabled LEO satellite networks [1] .
• In the unicast scenario, they considered the traffic splitting-based k-segment
routing strategy to optimize the MLU.
• Results of MLU are compared

• Gurobi solver to solve the LP problem (2-sr, 3-sr)

• Satellite network is 15*15, not the large scale network

[1]M. Hu, M. Xiao, W. Xu, T. Deng, Y. Dong, and K. Peng, “Traffic Engineering for Software-Defined LEO
5
Constellations,” IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 5090–5103, Dec. 2022.
 Related Work
They proposed to minimize the maximum satellite load (MSL) in the ground
station-assisted Low-Earth Orbit Satellite Constellations (LEO-SC) topology [2].
• Traffic is from the evenly distributed ground relays (19)
• Assume linking capacity is not the bottleneck
• Satellites have limited traffic processing capability

𝐿! is the incoming links at satellite 𝑠

𝜂" is the traffic load carried by link 𝑙 ∈ 𝐿!

• No direct contribution to minimize MLU

• They optimize the traffic among ground relays
[2]S. Zhang, X. Li, and K. L. Yeung, “Segment routing for traffic engineering and effective recovery in low-earth
6
orbit
satellite constellations,” Digital Communications and Networks, p. S2352864822001973, Oct. 2022.
System Model-Satellite Network Model
We consider satellites interconnect with each other following a +GRID configuration,
which makes the topology remain unchanged as ISL pairs remain constant.

+Grid: each satellite connects to its successor and predecessor within its orbital plane as well as the nearest
satellite from each adjacent plane.
DN

Node 1 1,1 2,1 3,1 4,1 5,1 6,1

DM
Node 2 1,2 2,2 3,2 4,2 5,2 6,2

Node 3 1,3 2,3 3,3 4,3 5,3 6,3

DM
DN

Node 4 1,4 2,4 3,4 4,4 5,4 6,4

Node 5 1,5 2,5 3,5 4,5 5,5 6,5

7
Orbit 1 Orbit 2 Orbit 3 Orbit 4 Orbit 5 Orbit 6
System Model-Problem Formulation
The main objective is to minimize MLU 𝜃 in the large-scale LEO network by
optimizing the traffic splitting ratio among the shortest paths.
• 𝑓!,# denote the traffic demand from node 𝑖 ∈ 𝑉 to 𝑗 ∈ 𝑉.
• 𝒫!,# is the set of shortest paths by hop count node 𝑖 ∈ 𝑉 to 𝑗 ∈ 𝑉.
$
• 𝑥!,# ∈ [0,1] is the decision variable, which represents the fraction of traffic demand of flow 𝑓!,# that travels
through the 𝑝%& path n the set 𝒫!,# .

P1 Minimize the MLU

The load of each link not exceeds the maximum link load

All traffic within each flow is routed in the network

Traffic travels on the shortest paths and is non-negative

8
Proposed Method-CESLP Algorithm
We propose the Cluster-based Elephant Flow Splitting via Linear Programming
(CESLP) algorithm for addressing distributed TE optimizing problem in the large-
scale LEO constellation.

• Fast Shortest Path Calculation: quickly generating the set of shortest paths by utilizing the
regular grid topology

• Mice and Elephant Flows Refinement: refining traffic management through the mice and
elephant flows

• Cluster-based Distributed Optimization: dividing the whole problem into subproblems for
cluster-based distributed optimization

9
Fast Shortest Path Calculation
When the number of nodes in the network increases, the number of shortest
paths among a distant pair of nodes (𝒊, 𝒋) grows exponentially. An fast
shortest path calculation strategy is employed in the 2D grid topology.

The relative position between nodes is leveraged to

obtain paths for other through a shifting mechanism.

• Determine the relative position as (∆𝑁, ∆𝑀) ,

∆𝑁 = 𝑖′ − 𝑖 is the shift between orbit planes

∆𝑀 = 𝑗′ − 𝑗 is the intra-orbital shift.

• Apply the routing shifting function 𝑓 (6)

The set of shortest path of the flow from the node (0, 0)
to the node (2, 2) has the same patterns as the from 𝒫! !,# ! = 𝑓(𝒫!,# , ∆𝑁, ∆𝑀)
node (1, 1) to node (3, 3). 10
Mice and Elephant Flows Refinement
The traffic matrix exhibits inherent sparsity and low rank, we try to reduce the
dimensionality of traffic matrix by identifying the elephant flows.

• Traffic classification: employ the three-sigma rule 𝑓7,8 < 𝜇 𝑓7,8 + 3𝜎 𝑓7,8 to
classify flow 𝑓7,8 into elephant flows and mice flows.
• Mice flows: all traffic is directed and routed through one randomized shortest path in
𝒫7,8 .

• Elephant flows: distribute their traffic across multiple paths in 𝒫/7,8 .

𝒫/7,8 ⊆ 𝒫7,8 is the set of shortest paths that covers all the edges within the rectangular,
and the rectangular is the area from (𝑖, 𝑗) to other nodes. 11
Cluster-based Distributed Optimization
We consider to partition it into non-overlapping clusters for parallel computing, and
optimal the cluster-based traffic splitting.

P2 Minimize the MLU

The load of each link not exceeds the maximum

link load

All traffic within each flow is routed in the network

Traffic is on the shortest paths and is non-negative

12
Cluster-based Distributed Optimization
For the large-scale satellite network, we divide them into 𝑲 rectangles and inter-
9×;
connection regions. Each rectangle contains satellites, and each inter-
<

connection regions have the same number of edges in the cluster.

Example: 6 × 6 network
Rectangle A Rectangle B
• Divide into 4 rectangles
• Each rectangle contains 9 nodes and 12 edges
• There are 24 cross-region links and they can be
grouped into 2 inter-connection regions
Rectangle C Rectangle D

13
Experiments-Satellite Constellation
We conduct a performance evaluation of the Starlink constellation (Phase-I,
Shell-I), and capture snapshots every 5 minutes, starting from 12:00 PM GMT on
January 1, 2024. There are 100 snapshots in total.

14
Starlink constellation (Phase-I, Shell-I)
Experiments—Traffic Matrix
To model and generate traffic patterns in satellite networks[3], we consider
economic activity, GDP , to model Internet traffic distribution.
• Randomly generate 10,000 city pairs around the
world (The probability of a city being selected is
based on population/GDP)

• Each city is allocated to the nearest ground

station and then connects to the nearest
satellite

• Adding 10 Mbps of traffic between two city pairs

• Obtain the traffic matrix in the satellite network

Traffic visualization and map it into earth
[3] G. Giuliari, T. Ciussani, A. Perrig, and A. Singla, “ICARUS: Attacking low Earth orbit satellite networks”. 15
in
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC). USENIX Association, 2021.
Experiments—Setup
Baseline:

• SP (Shortest Path): The traffic in the network is routed through a randomly chosen shortest path.

• SE (Shortest path with Equal splitting ratio): All the traffic can be split and routed with equal
splitting ratios on the set of shortest paths 𝒫'#,% .

• ESLP (Elephant flow Splitting via LP): Only elephant flows can be split and distributed across the
set of shortest paths 𝒫'#,% . Mice flows are not split and randomly routed on one of the shortest paths
𝒫#,% . Moreover, the splitting ratios for elephant flows are optimized by LP solver

Network:
• 12×12 subgraph: a sub-graph of the Starlink constellation with the size of 12×12 (4 rectangles)
• Starlink constellation: the full constellation with the size of 22×72 (12 rectangles)
16
Experiments—Performance
The MLU results on 12×12 subgraph.
Compared with the SP algorithm and SE algorithm, the CSELP algorithm reduce
the average MLU by 28.49% and 20.82%, respectively.

• The proposed CESLP algorithm with an average

MLU of 0.502.
• The SE algorithm achieves a lower average MLU
of 0.634 than the SP algorithm by splitting the
traffic equally.
• The ESLP algorithm with an average MLU of
0.539, obtains the second-best performance.
17
Experiments—Performance
The MLU results on Starlink. The proposed CSELP algorithm outperforms the SP
algorithm and SE algorithm, reducing the average MLU by 25.49% and 7.91%.
The proposed CSELP algorithm can solve the TE problem in about 1 minute.

18
Conclusion
• Study the distributed TE optimization method in large-scale LEO

constellations.

• Formulate the minimum MLU as the LP objective and we divided the large-

scale LEO constellation into multiple clusters to solve subproblems.

• Proposed CESLP algorithm to optimize the splitting ratios for elephant flows

and minimize the MLU in the most congested cluster iteratively.

• The results show that the proposed CSELP algorithm can effectively

minimize the MLU with limited time on the Starlink constellation .

19
Future work
Continue the work on hop-based segment routing

20