Paper: GeoFeed in the wild: A case study on StarlinkISP.net
slides-ipgeows-paper-geofeed-in-the-wild-a-case-study-on-starlinkispnet-00

Jianping Pan and Jinwei Zhao

Low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks, exemplified by SpaceX’s Starlink, Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper and Telesat’s Lightspeed and followed by others, have revolutionized the Internet access, particularly in rural areas, in the air and on the sea, where traditionally Internet access technologies are unavailable, too costly, very limited or simply impossible. Besides lower latency and higher capacity on the ground, LEO networks also introduce new challenges such as frequent satellite handover. For example, Starlink hands over every 15 seconds, fixed at the 12th, 27th, 42nd and 57th seconds off each minute. With a different satellite and likely ground station, the latency between user terminal (i.e., dish) and user’s home point-of-presence (PoP) changes greatly, which confuses TCP congestion control algorithms (i.e., a sudden latency increase leads to premature timeout and decrease results in packet reordering and duplicate acknowledgment). TCP and QUIC adjustment and bitrate adaptation are used to improve protocol and application performance over LEO networks.