Inter-Orbital Cluster Formation and Routing in Satellite Sensor Network

Satellite plays an important role in earth observation, collecting the scientific information and providing multimedia services etc. Traditional satellites are costly to build, launch, design and operate. Thus to overcome these challenges of traditional single satellites, small satellites are used to which form a collaborative network to accomplish the mission. These small satellites are less expensive and reduced development time. The network of small satellites is called as Satellite sensor networks (SSNs) [29]. SSNs consist of large number of small, inexpensive, robust and low power satellites (nodes) working co-operatively. These SSNs are constrained by latency, limited sensor energy; but the real time applications such as above demands delay sensitive, reliable, limited sensor node size and energy efficient routing protocols in SSNs. It is also found that routing is one of major concern of satellite sensor networks. Hence, in this paper we propose cluster based routing protocol. The proposed scheme operates as follows. (1) Deployed satellites on various orbits form the clusters and elect the cluster head, (2) whenever the satellites are revolving around the orbit and come near the apogee, they transmit their data to other node in different orbit which is also called as orbit head node, (3) orbit head node intern transmit their data to cluster head, (4) cluster head filters the data to eliminate the redundant information and sends it to ground station using up/down link at perigee. The performance of the work is verified in terms of parameters such as network lifetime, energy consumption, average delay and cluster formation time.