Low Earth Orbit Satellite Supported Multi-Hop Dissemination of Messages in V2X Networks

Due to their unique mobility, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can provide network services in areas with little to no existing infrastructure and due to their low orbit they enable communication at low latencies. We thus motivate the use of LEO satellites for supporting multi-hop Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication as an alternative to dense base station deployment and present CLEO, an approach that can opportunistically use LEO satellites for information dissemination among vehicles. Using extensive computer simulations, we show that not only are relaying latencies low enough for such an approach to be feasible, but we can actually improve performance of information dissemination in terms of all of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Channel Busy Ratio (CBR), and end-to-end latency.