research-article

Network topology design at 27,000 km/hour

Authors:

Debopam Bhattacherjee and

Ankit SinglaAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '19: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies

December 2019

Pages 341 - 354

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359989.3365407

Published: 03 December 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Upstart space companies are actively developing massive constellations of low-flying satellites to provide global Internet service. We examine the problem of designing the inter-satellite network for low latency and high capacity. We posit that the high density of these new constellations and the high-velocity nature of such systems render traditional approaches for network design ineffective, motivating new methods specialized for this problem setting.

We propose one such method, explicitly aimed at tackling the high temporal dynamism inherent to low-Earth orbit satellites. We exploit repetitive patterns in the network topology to avoid expensive link changes over time, while still providing near-minimal latencies at nearly 2× the throughput of standard past methods. Further, we observe that the geometry of satellite constellations admits more efficient designs, if a small, controlled amount of dynamism in links is permissible. For the leading Starlink constellation, our approach enables an efficiency improvement of 54%.

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Index Terms

Network topology design at 27,000 km/hour
1. Networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '19: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies

December 2019

395 pages

ISBN:9781450369985

DOI:10.1145/3359989

General Chairs:
Aziz Mohaisen
University of Central Florida
,
Zhi-Li Zhang
University of Minnesota

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

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CoNEXT '19: The 15th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 9 - 12, 2019

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