LEO Topology Design Under Real-World Deployment Constraints

TL;DR

This paper introduces two novel topology design methods for large-scale LEO satellite networks that explicitly account for real-world deployment constraints, improving delay, capacity, and adaptability over existing approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents the LSL and SA topology design methods tailored for real-world LEO deployment challenges, including partial deployment and node turnover, with demonstrated performance improvements.

Findings

Up to 45% lower average end-to-end delay

65% fewer hops compared to +Grid

Up to 2.3 times higher network capacity

Abstract

The performance of large-scale Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) networks, which consist of thousands of satellites interconnected by optical links, is dependent on its network topology. Existing topology designs often assume idealized conditions and do not account for real-world deployment dynamics, such as partial constellation deployment, daily node turnovers, and varying link availability, making them inapplicable to real LEO networks. In this paper, we develop two topology design methods that explicitly operate under real-world deployment constraints: the Long--Short Links (LSL) method, which systematically combines long-distance shortcut links with short-distance local links, and the Simulated Annealing (SA) method, which constructs topologies via stochastic optimization. Evaluated under both full deployment and partial deployment scenarios using 3-months of Starlink data, our methods achieve up to 45% lower average end-to-end delay, 65% fewer hops, and up to $2.3\times$ higher network capacity compared to +Grid. Both methods are designed to handle daily node turnovers by incrementally updating the topology, maintaining good network performance while avoiding costly full reconstruction of the topology.