Location Aware LEO Satellite Mobility Model for Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network Simulation

In order to provide low-latency high-throughput Internet access all over the world, companies like SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb currently deploy and maintain Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. Thousands of small satellites orbit Earth at an altitude of roughly 500km. Such a system is perfect for supporting vehicular networks by means of providing Internet access even in regions in which cellular communication technologies like LTE or 5G are not available. For evaluating LEO satellite supported vehicular networks, the simulator Space_Veins is currently developed by us. It integrates LEO satellites in a Veins simulation to simulate Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks. Since LEO satellite constellations can consist out of thousands of satellites, the run time of a single simulation can get large as the position of every LEO satellite has to be updated in small regular intervals.

Goals of the thesis

However, most LEO satellites are not visible by the vehicles as the LEO satellites are below the horizon most of the time with respect to the vehicles' location. Precisely simulating their position even if they are below the horizon wastes a lot of computing resources. This thesis aims at updating the LEO satellite mobility model such that fine granular updates are only calculated when the LEO satellites are above the horizon. Basically, the following steps need to be performed:

• Get familiar with the existing implementation
• Adjust the LEO satellite mobility model such that position updates are only calculated when the LEO satellite is above the horizon
• Validate that the simulation results do not change and calculate the speed up

Keywords

C++, Network Simulation, Vehicular Networking, LEO Satellite Constellation, Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks

Literature

[1] Mario Franke and Christoph Sommer, “Toward Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network Simulation with 4D Topologies,” Proceedings of 19th IEEE/IFIP Conference on Wireless On demand Network Systems and Services (WONS 2024), Chamonix, France, January 2024. https://www.cms-labs.org/bib/franke2023toward/

Contact

• M. Franke
• C. Sommer