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.
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Computer Networks and Communications,Software
Cited by
49 articles.
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