New algorithm balances speed and reliability for satellite internet networks
Researchers have developed a way to dynamically manage connections on fast-moving LEO satellites, achieving near-perfect service reliability while maintaining data speeds around 35 Mbps. The breakthrough matters for telecom operators building global satellite networks, as it solves a long-standing tradeoff between keeping users connected and delivering usable bandwidth.
Originaltitel: In-Orbit Processing and Doppler-Adaptive Waveforms in O-RAN-Enabled LEO Networks: How Much Can We Gain?
<p>High orbital velocity of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites introduces frequent handovers and high Dopplers, making reliable mobility management a critical challenge. Earth-fixed beam operation has been proposed to reduce handover frequency, but this comes at the cost of increased Doppler dynamics, which may degrade link performance. Larger Subcarrier Spacing (SCS) improves Doppler tolerance but reduces spectral efficiency, creating a trade-off between availability and throughput. We propose a Joint Satellite and SCS Selection (JSSS) algorithm that dynamically selects the serving satellite and SCS to maximize successfully transmitted data per time slot while accounting for Doppler feasibility and handover delay. This paper investigates how the different placement of baseband processing functions (Split 7.2x, Split 2, and gNB) across Non-clustered (NC), 3-clustered (C3) and 5-clustered (5C) architectures-with varying cluster size and satellite density (1584- 1980)-affects mobility, availability, and throughput. Results show that Earth-fixed beams can achieve up to ~99.9% availability. With fixed CS algorithm, the optimal SCS is 240 kHz, yielding ~35 Mbps, while JSSS provides a modest additional gain of ~5%. Clustering does not yield a higher optimal throughput than NC, and even with a 25% increase in the number of satellites, C5 still fails to outperform NC.</p>