Network Characteristics of LEO Satellite Constellations: A Starlink-Based Measurement from End Users

TL;DR

This study measures and analyzes the network characteristics of Starlink's LEO satellite constellation, revealing its potential for global coverage but also highlighting user experience variability, environmental impacts, and current technical limitations.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive end-to-end measurement and analysis of Starlink's network performance, environmental effects, and operational challenges across diverse environments.

Findings

Starlink offers promising global coverage but with significant throughput and latency variability.

Environmental factors like weather and terrain heavily influence user experience and power consumption.

Current relay strategies face limitations for cross-ocean routes and mobility applications.

Abstract

Low Earth orbit Satellite Networks (LSNs) have been advocated as a key infrastructure for truly global coverage in the forthcoming 6G. This paper presents our initial measurement results and observations on the end-to-end network characteristics of Starlink, arguably the largest LSN constellation to date. Our findings confirm that LSNs are a promising solution towards ubiquitous Internet coverage over the Earth; yet, we also find that the users of Starlink experience much more dynamics in throughput and latency than terrestrial network users, and even frequent outages. Its user experiences are heavily affected by environmental factors such as terrain, solar storms, rain, clouds, and temperature, so is the power consumption. We further analyze Starlink's current bent-pipe relay strategy and its limits, particularly for cross-ocean routes. We have also explored its mobility and portability potentials, and extended our experiments from urban cities to wild remote areas that are facing distinct practical and cultural challenges.