Considerations for Benchmarking Network Performance in Satellite Internet Constellations
draft-lai-bmwg-sic-benchmarking-02

Abstract

Entering the "NewSpace" era, satellite Internet constellations (SIC) are scaling up at a fast pace. Emerging satellite networks constructed upon SICs enable great opportunities for ubiquitous and low-latency Internet services globally. It should be useful for satellite service providers to run various laboratory experiments to comprehensively and systematically benchmark the network performance of their new network techniques before launching them to the outer space. However, existing benchmarking methodologies for terrestrial networks either achieve fidelity but lack flexibility or achieve flexibility but lack fidelity. This draft describes our basic considerations as specifications to guide the network performance benchmark for SICs. A satellite network constructed upon emerging SICs in low earth orbit has many unique characteristics as compared to existing terrestrial networks. Specifically, our considerations include multiple networking models of emerging SICs, a data-driven benchmarking approach which may enable testers to build a laboratory benchmark environment with acceptable flexibility and fidelity to support various experiments, critical configuration parameters that might affect the SIC network performance, and several suggested test cases for network performance benchmarking.

Authors

Zeqi Lai
Hewu Li
Qi Zhang
Qian Wu
Yangtao Deng

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)