Measuring Weather Effects and Link Quality Dynamics in LEO Satellite Networks

TL;DR

This study empirically investigates how atmospheric liquid water, rather than general cloud presence, affects link quality in LEO satellite networks, highlighting the significance of weather and hardware upgrades on performance.

Contribution

It provides detailed measurements linking atmospheric liquid water to satellite link quality and demonstrates the impact of hardware and infrastructure upgrades over time.

Findings

Liquid water path correlates with throughput reductions.

General cloud presence does not significantly affect performance.

Hardware upgrades improve network performance.

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study of dynamic factors affecting link quality in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communications, using Starlink as a case study. Over 56 days, 112 high-quality meteorological measurements in mostly 1-min intervals, co-located with a user terminal, were collected, alongside frequent network performance data. Cloud characteristics were estimated using professional weather instruments such as a ceilometer, microwave radiometer, and vision-language model on sky images. Our results show that general cloud presence does not significantly impact throughput or latency. The impact of cloud coverage rather depends on the presence of liquid water in the atmosphere, quantified by liquid water path (LWP), which correlates with notable download throughput reductions (up to 60 MBit/s), especially during rain. Upload and latency were largely unaffected. Analysis of the evolving satellite network revealed that newer satellite hardware and infrastructural upgrades also contributed to performance increases during the experiment period. These findings highlight atmospheric liquid water as the key weather-related factor affecting link quality and underscore the influence of network changes over time.