L2D2: Low latency distributed downlink for LEO satellites

Deepak Vasisht, Jayanth Shenoy, Ranveer Chandra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Large constellations of Low Earth Orbit satellites promise to provide near real-time high-resolution Earth imagery. Yet, getting this large amount of data back to Earth is challenging because of their low orbits and fast motion through space. Centralized architectures with few multi-million dollar ground stations incur large hour-level data download latency and are hard to scale. We propose a geographically distributed ground station design, L2D2, that uses low-cost commodity hardware to offer low latency robust downlink. L2D2 is the first system to use a hybrid ground station model, where only a subset of ground stations are uplink-capable. We design new algorithms for scheduling and rate adaptation that enable low latency and high robustness despite the limitations of the receive-only ground stations. We evaluate L2D2 through a combination of trace-driven simulations and real-world satellite-ground station measurements. Our results demonstrate that L2D2's geographically distributed design can reduce data downlink latency from 90 minutes to 21 minutes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages151-164
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450383837
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 9 2021
Event2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Aug 23 2021Aug 27 2021

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

Conference

Conference2021 Annual Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication on the Applications, SIGCOMM 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period8/23/218/27/21

Keywords

  • distributed ground station
  • earth observation
  • ground station architecture
  • satellite networking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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