LEOCraft: Towards Designing Performant LEO Networks

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have revolutionized Internet access for millions of users. OneWeb and SpaceX are already operating constellations of hundreds and thousands of satellites, offering Internet service directly from space across 100+ countries. These exceptionally large networks come at a cost – thousands of routers (satellites) need to fly at ~22× the speed of sound, thus making network design a non-trivial challenge. While the systems research community with decades of deep networking expertise has a relatively short window to influence the design of these networks, there is a serious lack of the right tools to enable such efforts. To address this, we introduce LEOCraft – an LEO network design framework to help the community visualize and evaluate the performance of different choices. LEOCraft offers integrated optimization techniques tuned upon the domain knowledge acquired from thousands of LEO constellation design's performance evaluations to optimize a new constellation design ~5× faster than other off-the-shelf black-box optimization techniques. LEOCraft scales up seamlessly, tested for 83K satellites across multiple shells (more than 2× SpaceX's long-term proposal) with 1K ground stations, thus making it feasible for the community to explore LEO trajectory and topology design for even the largest of mega-constellations.