GAMS: An IP Address Management Mechanism in Satellite Mega-constellation Networks

The booming of satellite mega-constellations to provide Internet access around the Earth is attracting more attention recently. To provide broadband Internet globally, satellites will be responsible to undertake IP address management of ground terminals. However, the movement of the LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellite will cause difficulties to IP address management, because every LEO satellite can just stay in sight of a ground terminal for several minutes. On one hand, stateful IP address management faces a short lifetime, signal storm, and unstable address space problems. On the other hand, stateless IP address management cannot avoid high overhead in DAD (Duplicate Address Detection). This paper proposes GAMS, Geographical Addressing Management for Satellite, an efficient IP address management mechanism for mega-constellations networks. By embedding both satellites' feature information and geographical location into IPv6 addresses, GAMS enables efficient DAD with assigned address tables ONLY on respective satellite routers. Theoretical proof and simulation results validate that GAMS could effectively provide unique and long-lifetime IPv6 addresses to ground terminals with negligible cost.