Satellite Networks
Satellites have been able to carry Internet traffic for decades. The old ones were large and geostationary, parked far above the equator and acting as simple relays: your signal went up to the satellite and came straight back down to a ground station. That works, but you get far less bandwidth and far more delay than with a cable. Newer satellites fly much closer to Earth. Each one sees only a small patch of the surface, so you need a lot of them, and they have to pass traffic to one another to reach a ground station. The constellation itself becomes the network.
Constellations like Starlink now have thousands of satellites across different orbits. They reach places a cable will never go, they keep working when ground infrastructure fails, and they can beat terrestrial networks on latency, since light travels faster through vacuum than through glass. Operating them is another matter. Low Earth Orbit constellations are highly dynamic and tightly constrained. Our work asks how to deal with that without giving up the benefits, by applying what we already know about networks and developing new techniques where that knowledge does not transfer.
Active Members
Talks
All But Regular: Revisiting the Starlink Constellation