Satellite networking has been a very active research area in both academia and industry recently. Starlink provides high-speed, low-latency Internet access. More companies have claimed to provide similar services soon. It is expected that different industries will embrace satellite network business in the future. This paper reviews the achievements in satellite-related works in standard organizations (IETF and 3GPP) from the networking perspective (Layer 2/3 and above). The issues and challenges in different areas are analyzed, such as IP networking for massive satellite constellations, wireless network architecture for Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) integration, etc. Based on the latest developments, the paper envisions the evolution direction and outlines the study items for satellite networks in 6G.

This document proposes a method of addressing and routing for massive Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. It is based on the concepts and technologies of New IP. LEO satellite networks can be used for Internet access and for the Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) integration with 5G and beyond. Our new addressing method leverages the characteristics of satellites with known orbit elements; and simplifies the satellite identification by using limited indexes. The new routing method combines semantic addressing with source routing and generates a new semantic routing scheme. Compared with traditional methods, the new proposal dramatically reduces the workload in satellite, such as table size, TCAM (Ternary Content-addressable Memory) lookups, and packet header size. Thus, it is more suitable to network in space where the harsh environment will restrict the hardware performance, power consumption, link bandwidth and system complexity.