Your Mega-Constellations Can Be Slim: A Cost-Effective Approach for Constructing Survivable and Performant LEO Satellite Networks

Recently we have witnessed the active deployment of mega-constellations with hundreds to thousands of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, targeting at constructing LEO satellite networks (LSN) to provide ubiquitous Internet services globally. However, while the massive deployment of LEO satellites can improve the network survivability and performance of an LSN, it also involves additional sustainable challenges such as higher deployment cost, risk of satellite conjunction and space debris.

In this paper, we investigate an important research problem facing the upcoming satellite Internet: from a network perspective, how many satellites exactly do we need to construct a survivable and performant LSN? To answer this question, we first formulate the survivable and performant LSN design (SPLD) problem, which aims to find the minimum number of needed satellites to construct an LSN that can provide sufficient amount of redundant paths, required link capacity and acceptable latency for traffic carried by the LSN. Second, to efficiently solve the tricky SPLD problem, we propose MEGAREDUCE, a requirement-driven constellation optimization mechanism, which can calculate feasible solutions for SPLD in polynomial time. Finally, we conduct extensive tracedriven simulations to verify MEGAREDUCE's cost-effectiveness in constructing survivable and performant LSNs on demand, and showcase how MEGAREDUCE can help optimize the incremental deployment and long-term maintenance of future satellite Internet.