Project Description
Satellite Internet has the potential to provide connectivity to areas (such as remote and underdeveloped regions) where the necessary terrestrial infrastructure is either currently unavailable or difficult to deploy. Satellite Network Operators (SNOs) (e.g., Starlink, OneWeb, O3B) are currently in early stages of deploying satellite constellations to explore this available market, thereby opening new digital possibilities for billions of people. However, there is very little publicly available knowledge about the intrinsic details of SNOs. Despite existing early measurements [2, 3, 4, 5], both the design and operation of Starlink - one of the largest deployments of satellite constellations remain opaque to the research community. In this project, we will conduct a deep exploration of Starlink’s infrastructure and operations. This will contribute to a better understanding of satellite networking with Starlink, including its challenges and opportunities.
References
[1] CelesTrak, June 2025, [Online; https://celestrak.org/].
[2] R. Richter, V. Ververis, and V. Bajpai, “Breaking through the clouds: Performance insights into starlink’s latency and packet loss,” IFIP Networking 2025, 2025.
[3] D. Laniewski, E. Lanfer, S. Beginn, J. Dunker, M. Dückers, and N. Aschenbruck, “Starlink on the road: A first look at mobile starlink performance in central europe,” CoRR, vol. abs/2403.13497, 2024. [Online]. Available: doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.13497
[4] F. Michel, M. Trevisan, D. Giordano, and O. Bonaventure, “A first look at starlink performance,” in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2022, Nice, France, October 25-27, 2022, C. Barakat, C. Pelsser, T. A. Benson, and D. R. Choffnes, Eds. ACM, 2022, pp. 130–136. [Online]. Available: doi.org/10.1145/3517745.3561416
[5] S. Ma, Y. C. Chou, H. Zhao, L. Chen, X. Ma, and J. Liu, “Network characteristics of LEO satellite constellations: A starlink-based measurement from end users,” in IEEE INFOCOM 2023 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, New York City, NY, USA, May 17-20, 2023. IEEE, 2023, pp. 1–10, movement, Environment, LEO, Performance, Comparison LEO vs Terrestrial , TCP vs UDP, Power Consumption, Bent-Pipe. [Online]. Available: doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM53939.2023.10228912
Contact
Prof. Dr. Vaibhav Bajpai
Head of Data-Intensive Internet Computing
Phone: +49 331 5509-3435
Mail: office-bajpa[email protected]
