Contents I. Introduction
With the advent of the 5G era and the rapid growth of global communication services, satellite communications have affected every aspect of people’s lives. The compelling applications of Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks in our lives have been witnessed, ranging from weather forecasts to military monitoring, even sensor observation missions, disaster prevention, anti-terrorism security, ship escort, and other activities. LEO satellite networks have grown in importance as a complement to terrestrial networks aiming at delivering global, ubiquitous communication [1] [2]. LEO, with its characteristics of large bandwidth, low delay, low transmission latency, wide coverage, and all-weather, has not only become an effective scheme to make up for the ground network coverage of the blind zone; but also an important part of the future space-air-ground integrated network [3]. However, due to its powerful end-to-end data transmission capability, the data transmission tasks carried by each satellite are different, which can easily produce uneven load distribution and easily lead to inter-satellite link congestion problems, affecting the service quality for users. Therefore, the research of load balancing routing algorithms for LEO satellites now has wide application prospects to realize the end-to-end high-quality transmission of service.
