Several "NewSpace" companies have launched the first of thousands of planned satellites for providing global broadband Internet service. The resulting low-Earth-orbit (LEO) constellations will not only bridge the digital divide by providing service to remote areas, but they also promise much lower latency than terrestrial fiber for long-distance routes. We show that unlocking this potential is non-trivial: such constellations provide inherently variable connectivity, which today's Internet is ill-suited to accommodate. We therefore study cost-performance tradeoffs in the design space for Internet routing that incorporates satellite connectivity examining four solutions ranging from naively using BGP to an ideal, clean-slate design. We find that the optimal solution is provided by a path-aware networking architecture in which end-hosts obtain information and control over network paths. However, a pragmatic and more deployable approach inspired by the design of content distribution networks can also achieve stable and close-to-optimal performance.

中文翻译：

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太空中的互联网骨干网

几家“NewSpace”公司已经发射了数千颗计划中的第一颗卫星，用于提供全球宽带互联网服务。由此产生的低地球轨道 (LEO) 星座不仅将通过向偏远地区提供服务来弥合数字鸿沟，而且它们还承诺比用于长距离路由的地面光纤的延迟要低得多。我们表明，释放这种潜力并非易事：这样的星座提供了固有的可变连接性，而今天的互联网不适合适应这种情况。因此，我们研究了包含卫星连接的互联网路由设计空间中的成本性能权衡，研究了四种解决方案，从天真地使用 BGP 到理想的全新设计。我们发现最佳解决方案是由路径感知网络架构提供的，在该架构中，终端主机获取信息并控制网络路径。然而，受内容分发网络设计启发的务实且更具可部署性的方法也可以实现稳定且接近最佳的性能。