NDN’s Stateful Forwarding Plane Meeting Frequent Connectivity Changes of LEO Satellite Constellations

As a data-centric network architecture, Named Data Networking (NDN) has a unique feature in its stateful forwarding plane, where Interest packets are routed towards data sources, leaving behind breadcrumb traces that steer requested data packets back to consumers. However, if one wishes to run NDN on LEO satellite networks (satnet), the frequent connectivity handovers in such an environment would disrupt the states of NDN's forwarding plane. In this poster, we first graphically illustrate several functions enabled by NDN's stateful forwarding plane, then describe the disruptions to this forwarding plane by frequent handovers due to fast LEO satellite movement, and explain the difference between the LEO satellite handover problem and today's mobile IP node handover. We argue that effective solutions to the above problems should be developed to enable NDN deployment over LEO satnets.