Demo: The Impact of LEO Satellite Network Instabilities on the Performance of Networking Applications

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks like Starlink are susceptible to both external factors (e.g., weather and obstruction) and internal factors such as frequency and resource allocation changes. This causes performance instabilities by design. In this demo, we show that such instabilities can have a detrimental impact on the performance of TCP and consequently on large parts of today’s internet, as most traffic uses TCP as transport protocol. Consequently, LEO-specific adaptations to either TCP and/or higher-level applications are necessary.