Load-aware Ground Station Assignment for Low Earth Orbit Satellite Networks

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations face ground segment bottlenecks due to uneven user demand, which overloads Ground-to-Satellite Links (GSLs). The common practice of routing traffic to the nearest Ground Station (GS) to minimize latency often causes severe load imbalance. This paper proposes a load-aware assignment strategy that minimizes the maximum GSL utilization by routing traffic to non-nearest GSs via inter-satellite links. To maintain service quality, assignments are constrained by a latency threshold relative to the nearest-GS baseline. We formulate this as a mixed-integer linear program. Preliminary results using realistic Starlink constellation parameters show the proposed solution can reduce average maximum GSL utilization, mitigating ground segment congestion.