Coded multicasting for content delivery over predictable time-varying satellite communication networks

With the development of astronautic technology, communication satellites now have a tremendous gain in both quantity and quality, and have already shown their capability on multi-functional converged communication other than telecommunication. Under this circumstance, increasing the transmission efficiency of satellite communication network becomes a top priority. In this paper, we focus on content delivery service on satellite networks, where each ground station may have prefetched some file fragments. We cast this problem into a coded caching framework so as to exploit the coded multicast gain for minimizing the satellite communication load. We first propose an optimization-based coded multicast scheme by considering the special property that the satellite network topology is predictable and time-variant. Then, a greedy based fast algorithm is proposed, which can tremendously reduce the computation complexity with a small loss in optimality. Simulation experiments conducted on two Walker constellation satellite networks show that our proposed coded multicast method can efficiently reduce the communication load of satellite networks.