Toward Autonomous GNSS Networking: Low-Complexity Onboard Routing and Topology-Routing Co-Construction

RESUMO

Inter-satellite links constitute a critical enabler for the autonomous operation of global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs).Nevertheless, onboard routing still poses substantial challenges, stemming from the frequent topology variations of GNSS constellations and the constraint of limited onboard computational resources for routing calculation. This paper develops a routing and topology-control framework tailored to the time-slotted structure of GNSS inter-satellite networks. By exploiting the fact that each satellite communicates with at most one scheduled peer in a slot, the proposed routing method propagates future delivery information backward over the slot sequence and directly determines whether data should be stored or forwarded. This structure avoids massive end-to-end path searches and enables topology generation and routing computation to proceed concurrently. The same delivery information is further introduced into topology construction so that link scheduling can directly account for end-to-end communication performance. A master-satellite autonomous orbit-determination scenario is used to demonstrate this topology--routing co-construction mechanism. In a 24-h, 30-satellite BeiDou scenario, the proposed routing method achieves routing performance comparable to Contact Graph Routing while reducing routing computation time by approximately 1500 times. The co-constructed topology further improves all-to-all communication and both master-related traffic directions while preserving strong inter-satellite ranging performance. These results fill a critical gap between autonomous topology planning and autonomous routing computation, supporting more complete onboard autonomous networking for future GNSSs.