@inproceedings{vasisht2021l,
author = {Vasisht, Deepak and Shenoy, Jayanth and Chandra, Ranveer},
title = {L2D2: Low Latency Distributed Downlink for Low Earth Orbit Satellites},
booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM 2021},
year = {2021},
month = {August},
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.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/l2d2-low-latency-distributed-downlink-for-low-earth-orbit-satellites/},
}