LEO Satellites (Low Earth Orbit) operate at altitudes typically between 160 and 2,000 kilometers, significantly closer to Earth than geostationary satellites. Their proximity enables lower signal latency and higher data throughput, making LEO constellations increasingly important for global broadband connectivity, remote sensing, and communications in underserved areas. In optical networking and telecommunications research, LEO satellites introduce challenges in handover management, Doppler compensation, dynamic routing, and integration with terrestrial fiber networks.
We propose to jointly optimize path and gateway selection to achieve load balancing for mobile orbital domain-based hierarchical routing in satellite networks. The load at bottleneck gateway satellites can be reduced by 22% on average.