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Internet backbones in space

Published: 23 March 2020 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    Several "NewSpace" companies have launched the first of thousands of planned satellites for providing global broadband Internet service. The resulting low-Earth-orbit (LEO) constellations will not only bridge the digital divide by providing service to remote areas, but they also promise much lower latency than terrestrial fiber for long-distance routes. We show that unlocking this potential is non-trivial: such constellations provide inherently variable connectivity, which today's Internet is ill-suited to accommodate. We therefore study cost-performance tradeoffs in the design space for Internet routing that incorporates satellite connectivity examining four solutions ranging from naively using BGP to an ideal, clean-slate design. We find that the optimal solution is provided by a path-aware networking architecture in which end-hosts obtain information and control over network paths. However, a pragmatic and more deployable approach inspired by the design of content distribution networks can also achieve stable and close-to-optimal performance.

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    Published In

    cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
    ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 50, Issue 1
    January 2020
    65 pages
    ISSN:0146-4833
    DOI:10.1145/3390251
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 March 2020
    Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 50, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. internet
    2. low-earth-orbit satellite networks
    3. routing

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    • (2024)DoSat: A DDoS Attack on the Vulnerable Time-Varying Topology of LEO Satellite NetworksApplied Cryptography and Network Security10.1007/978-3-031-54773-7_11(265-282)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2024
    • (2023)Making Sense of Constellations: Methodologies for Understanding Starlink's Scheduling AlgorithmsCompanion of the 19th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3624354.3630586(37-43)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
    • (2023)×Grid: A Location-oriented Topology Design for LEO SatellitesProceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on LEO Networking and Communication10.1145/3614204.3616110(37-42)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2023
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    • (2023)Distance-Based Back-Pressure Routing for Load-Balancing LEO Satellite NetworksIEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology10.1109/TVT.2022.320661672:1(1240-1253)Online publication date: Jan-2023
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