Submitted: August 2024
Abstract
In recent years, the idea of Internet from Space has become reality for an average person with the emergence of Starlink and other upcoming Low Earth Orbit mega constellations. In the few years Starlink has been offering service to the public, they have amassed several million customers.
In this thesis, we review current research about the Starlink constellation and attempt to verify claims for which data has not been presented. In addition, we have discovered that there are occasional disagreements between different research papers. In order to verify or dispute claims presented, we evaluate current measurement tools available for measuring the constellation’s network performance. We then develop a set of own tools with high scalability and deploy them to our dishes in Córdoba, Argentina and Saarbrücken, Germany.
Using the small amount of data from evaluation of other tools and the dataset spanning five weeks from our own tool, we analyze traffic and network behavior. We find that in the area of the South Atlantic Anomaly, space weather seems to have measurable impact on network performance. Even in close proximity to a ground station, the round-trip time of packets can vary greatly, indicating that Inter satellite links (ISL) are used even when the usage of ISL is suboptimal.