TY - JOUR
T1 - Geometric Spread Routing for Security-Oriented Communication in Mega LEO Constellations
AU - Liu, Zeyu
AU - Wang, Shuai
AU - Pan, Gaofeng
AU - Miao, Xiaqing
AU - Krikidis, Ioannis
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2002-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2026
Y1 - 2026
N2 - Predictable relay reuse in regular inter-satellite-link meshes can expose repeated low Earth orbit communications to traffic-aware observation even when payloads are encrypted. This paper formulates a bounded relay-observation model and introduces Geometric Path Entropy (GPE), which jointly measures path-use uncertainty and probability-weighted geometric separation. We then design Geometric Spread Routing (GSR), which performs combinadic path selection offline and provides O(1) next-hop lookup within each topology epoch. Across 31 physically filtered snapshots and 12 stratified geographic demands, GSR increases GPE by 103%, reduces shared-link overlap by 53%, and raises the greedy full-coverage relay cost by 25% relative to the strongest baselines on common-routable cases. Under cumulative adaptive observation, it increases the 90-min full-coverage cost by 21.9%. On seven literature-aligned three-ISL graphs, the topology-aware variant improves normalized GPE by 12.8% and reduces overlap by 27.8% on average. Hardware-in-the-loop evaluation confirms forwarding consistency and low per-hop latency. These results validate GSR's resistance to bounded traffic-aware relay coverage across feasible topology epochs and routing demands.
AB - Predictable relay reuse in regular inter-satellite-link meshes can expose repeated low Earth orbit communications to traffic-aware observation even when payloads are encrypted. This paper formulates a bounded relay-observation model and introduces Geometric Path Entropy (GPE), which jointly measures path-use uncertainty and probability-weighted geometric separation. We then design Geometric Spread Routing (GSR), which performs combinadic path selection offline and provides O(1) next-hop lookup within each topology epoch. Across 31 physically filtered snapshots and 12 stratified geographic demands, GSR increases GPE by 103%, reduces shared-link overlap by 53%, and raises the greedy full-coverage relay cost by 25% relative to the strongest baselines on common-routable cases. Under cumulative adaptive observation, it increases the 90-min full-coverage cost by 21.9%. On seven literature-aligned three-ISL graphs, the topology-aware variant improves normalized GPE by 12.8% and reduces overlap by 27.8% on average. Hardware-in-the-loop evaluation confirms forwarding consistency and low per-hop latency. These results validate GSR's resistance to bounded traffic-aware relay coverage across feasible topology epochs and routing demands.
KW - geometric path entropy
KW - Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation
KW - multi-path routing
KW - relay observation
KW - routing security
KW - topology epoch
KW - traffic analysis
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105050174385
U2 - 10.1109/TMC.2026.3729354
DO - 10.1109/TMC.2026.3729354
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105050174385
SN - 1536-1233
JO - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
ER -