Mega-Constellation Satellite Networks—Addressing Rain Tele-Connections and Reducing Ground Segment Costs

Satellite mega-constellation networks aiming to provide high quality of service have a high number of ground stations and access high bandwidth millimetre wave frequencies with high susceptibility to rain tele-connections. Rain tele-connection induced attenuation cannot be mitigated via conventional site diversity. The use of multiple ground stations results in high costs that should be reduced. This paper proposes solutions to reduce content access latency and ground segment acquisition costs. The effect of rain tele-connections on throughput degradation is reduced by selecting ground stations with the least throughput degradation for data transmission. Latency reduction is achieved by enabling subscribers to access content from stratosphere based data centres instead of existing terrestrial data centres. The use of open ground station nodes (used when conventional ground stations have insufficient computing resources) to reduce ground segment acquisition costs is also proposed. The influence of the proposed solution on latency is examined via MATLAB simulation. The latency is determined via simulation for the case where data is accessed from terrestrial and stratosphere based data centres. In addition, the analysis examines the reduction in latency. Furthermore, the influence of using the heterogeneous ground stations in reducing ground segment acquisition costs via simulation is examined. The evaluation shows that the proposed architecture reduces the latency by 84.4% and 66.9% on average when data is accessed from terrestrial and stratosphere based data centres respectively. The proposed heterogeneous ground station architecture also reduces ground segment acquisition costs by up to 33.3% on average.