In recent years, there has been increasing investment in the deployment of massive commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations to provide global Internet connectivity. These constellations, now equipped with inter-satellite links, can serve as low-latency Internet backbones, requiring LEO satellites to act not only as access nodes for ground stations, but also as in-orbit core routers. Due to their high velocity and the resulting frequent handovers of ground gateways, LEO networks highly stress mobility procedures at both the sender and receiver endpoints. On the other hand, a growing trend in networking is the use of technologies based on the Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm for servicing IoT networks and sensor networks in general, as its addressing, storage, and security mechanisms are usually a good match for IoT needs. Furthermore, ICN networks possess additional characteristics that are beneficial for the massive LEO scenario. For instance, the mobility of the receiver is helped by the inherent data-forwarding procedures in their architectures. However, the mobility of the senders remains an open problem. This paper proposes a comprehensive solution to the mobility problem for massive LEO constellations using the Named-Data Networking (NDN) architecture, as it is probably the most mature ICN proposal. Our solution includes a scalable method to relate content to ground gateways and a way to address traffic to the gateway that does not require cooperation from the network routing algorithm. Moreover, our solution works without requiring modifications to the actual NDN protocol itself, so it is easy to test and deploy. Our results indicate that, for long enough handover lengths, traffic losses are negligible even for ground stations with just one satellite in sight.

翻译：近年来，为提供全球互联网连接，大规模商业低地球轨道星座的部署投入日益增加。这些现已配备星间链路的星座可作为低延迟互联网骨干网，要求低轨卫星不仅充当地面站的接入节点，还需担当在轨核心路由器。由于低轨卫星的高速运动导致地面网关频繁切换，低轨网络对发送端与接收端终端的移动性处理机制提出了极高要求。另一方面，网络领域日益增长的趋势是采用基于信息中心网络范式的技术来服务物联网网络及传感器网络，因为其寻址、存储和安全机制通常能很好地匹配物联网需求。此外，信息中心网络具备对大规模低轨场景有益的特性。例如，其架构中固有的数据转发机制有助于接收端的移动性支持。然而，发送端的移动性问题仍是待解决的开放课题。本文提出采用命名数据网络架构（当前最成熟的信息中心网络方案）解决大规模低轨星座移动性问题的完整方案。我们的解决方案包含关联内容与地面网关的可扩展方法，以及无需网络路由算法协同即可寻址至网关的流量引导机制。该方案无需修改现有NDN协议本身，便于测试与部署。实验结果表明：在足够长的切换时长条件下，即使对仅单星可见的地面站，流量损失亦可忽略不计。