Measuring Mobile Starlink Performance: A Comprehensive Look

IF 6.3 Q1 ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC

IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society Pub Date : 2025-02-07 DOI:10.1109/OJCOMS.2025.3539836

Dominic Laniewski;Eric Lanfer;Nils Aschenbruck

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

With the recent success of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as SpaceX’s Starlink, measuring their performance has been of great interest to the community. While stationary Starlink performance has been extensively assessed on a globalized view, mobile - in-motion - usage is relatively new. A first look at its performance has only been taken by three studies so far. In this paper, we take a comprehensive look at mobile Starlink performance from the measurement perspective by answering the following three research questions: (1) How does mobile Starlink performance differ in different regions of the world? (2) How does the mobile performance compare to stationary performance? (3) How does obstruction impact mobile performance? To answer these questions, we conduct our own 300 km long test-drive on the German Autobahn (highway) with car velocities up to 140 km/h. We compare our results to the datasets of the other three studies and to stationary measurements. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to deeper analyze the impact of obstructions on the performance. For this, we map bridges crossing the highway to our measurements and find that these short total obstructions cause significant burst packet loss, RTT spikes, and throughput drops. We show that mobility-induced instabilities can have a severe negative impact on the performance of higher-level applications such as HTTP bulk file transfer.

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来源期刊

IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society Multiple-

CiteScore

13.70

自引率

3.80%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： The IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (OJ-COMS) is an open access, all-electronic journal that publishes original high-quality manuscripts on advances in the state of the art of telecommunications systems and networks. The papers in IEEE OJ-COMS are included in Scopus. Submissions reporting new theoretical findings (including novel methods, concepts, and studies) and practical contributions (including experiments and development of prototypes) are welcome. Additionally, survey and tutorial articles are considered. The IEEE OJCOMS received its debut impact factor of 7.9 according to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) 2023. The IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society covers science, technology, applications and standards for information organization, collection and transfer using electronic, optical and wireless channels and networks. Some specific areas covered include: Systems and network architecture, control and management Protocols, software, and middleware Quality of service, reliability, and security Modulation, detection, coding, and signaling Switching and routing Mobile and portable communications Terminals and other end-user devices Networks for content distribution and distributed computing Communications-based distributed resources control.