Research Article
On the Impact of Intrinsic Delay Variation Sources on Iridium LEO Constellation
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-030-69069-4_18, author={Amal Boubaker and Emmanuel Chaput and Nicolas Kuhn and Jean-Baptiste Dup\^{e} and Renaud Sallantin and C\^{e}dric Baudoin and Andr\^{e}-Luc Beylot}, title={On the Impact of Intrinsic Delay Variation Sources on Iridium LEO Constellation}, proceedings={Wireless and Satellite Systems. 11th EAI International Conference, WiSATS 2020, Nanjing, China, September 17-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part I}, proceedings_a={WISATS}, year={2021}, month={2}, keywords={Satellite constellations Iridium constellation CUBIC TCP Handovers}, doi={10.1007/978-3-030-69069-4_18} }- Amal Boubaker
Emmanuel Chaput
Nicolas Kuhn
Jean-Baptiste Dupé
Renaud Sallantin
Cédric Baudoin
André-Luc Beylot
Year: 2021
On the Impact of Intrinsic Delay Variation Sources on Iridium LEO Constellation
WISATS
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-69069-4_18
Abstract
The recent decades have seen an increasing interest in Medium Earth Orbit and Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations. However, there is little information on the delay variation characteristics of these systems and the resulting impact on high layer protocols. To fill this gap, this paper simulates a constellation that exhibits the same delay characteristics as the already deployed Iridium but considers closer bandwidths to constellation projects’.
We identify five major sources of delay variation in polar satellite constellations with different occurrence rates: elevation, intra-orbital handover, inter-orbital handover, orbitalseamhandover and Inter-Satellite Link changes. We simulate file transfers of different sizes to assess the impact of each of these delay variations on the file transfer.
We conclude that the orbitalseamis the less frequent source of delay and induces a larger impact on a small file transfers: the orbitalseam, which occurs at most three times during 24 h, induces a(66\%)increase of the time needed to transmit a small file. Inter-orbital and intra-orbital handovers occur less often and reduce the throughput by approximately(\sim )(8\%)for both low and high throughput configurations. The other sources of delay variations have a negligible impact on small file transfers, and long file transfers are not impacted much by the delay variations.
