Stigmergy and Hierarchical Learning for Routing Optimization in Multi-domain Collaborative Satellite Networks

The integration of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents promising opportunities for managing and optimizing LEO satellite network routing. However, as the scale and coverage of satellite networks continue to expand, challenges are posed to both centralized and distributed architectures in terms of managing network information and coping with routing complexity. To overcome these challenges, leveraging distributed SDN technology, a stigmergy multi-agent hierarchical deep reinforcement learning routing algorithm is proposed in multi-domain collaborative satellite networks. A pheromone-based mechanism is incorporated to facilitate collaboration during independent training, and hierarchical control is employed to decouple the complexity of cross-domain routing decisions. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm exhibits good scalability and performance in large-scale satellite networks.