SKYCASTLE: Taming LEO Mobility to Facilitate Seamless and Low-latency Satellite Internet Services

TL;DR

SKYCASTLE is a novel mobility management system designed for LEO satellite networks, significantly reducing connection interruptions and latency to enable seamless global satellite Internet services for mobile users.

Contribution

The paper introduces SKYCASTLE, a new network-based mobility management mechanism that manages satellite and user mobility simultaneously, improving connection stability and latency in ISTNs.

Findings

Up to 55.8% increase in uninterrupted connection time.

47.8% reduction in latency.

Effective handling of satellite and user mobility in ISTNs.

Abstract

Emerging integrated space and terrestrial networks (ISTN) built upon low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations aim at providing planet-wide Internet services, not only for residential users, but also for mobile users (e.g., in airplane and cruise scenarios). Efficiently managing global mobility and keeping connections active for mobile users is critical for ISTN operators. However, our quantitative analysis identifies that existing mobility management (MM) schemes suffer from frequent connection interruptions and long latency in ISTN scenarios. The fundamental challenge stems from a unique characteristic of ISTNs: not only users are mobile, but also core network infrastructures (i.e., LEO satellites) are frequently changing their locations in the network. To facilitate seamless and low-latency satellite Internet services, this paper presents SKYCASTLE, a novel network-based global mobility management mechanism. SKYCASTLE incorporates two key techniques to address frequent connection interruptions in ISTNs. First, to reduce the interruption time, SKYCASTLE adopts distributed satellite anchors to track the location changes of mobile nodes, manage handovers and avoid routing convergence. Second, SKYCASTLE leverages an anchor manager to schedule MM functionalities at satellites to reduce deployment costs while guaranteeing low latency. Extensive evaluations combining real constellation information and mobile user trajectories show that: SKYCASTLE can improve up to 55.8% uninterrupted time and reduce 47.8% latency as compared to other existing MM solutions.